Goth-besotted director Tim Burton has a great deal of fun painting Lewis Carroll's psychedelic landscape a darker shade of crazy in his first 3D outing. A more honest title for this movie might have been 'Return To Wonderland'; we only get a few brief snatches of the original tale as it occurred to the titular heroine in Carroll's novel.

Here instead Alice (newcomer Mia Wasikowska, apparently a splice between Uma Thurman and Keira Knightley) has grown to womanhood a bit of a tomboy, deeply uninterested in the society marriage her family are pressuring her into, and determined to plough an independent furrow and get into some amusing trouble.

Running from a horrendously public and pre-arranged proposal of marriage, Alice falls down the same hole she did in the original, only to find Wonderland (actually called 'Underland', in the first of many dire attempts to inject a little Tolkien into Carroll's whimsy) in a state of fear and near-war, the Red Queen an ambitious tyrant and the Mad Hatter schizophrenic. There's a dragon to be slain, only one sword that can do it and only one person pre-destined to wield that sword…

Before this awful and calculated cynicism sets into Alice In Wonderland, the film proves an absolute joy, with excellent performances from the entire cast and a superb retinue of Carroll favourites - such as Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas) and the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) - recreated with boundless imagination, skill and wit. The luscious, sprawling landscapes rival the recent Avatar and Burton is as in his element bringing all this to life as he could possibly be. Even Johnny Depp's impossibly huge-eyed Mad Hatter initially seems a new and promising comic creation.

But somewhere about the seventy-minute mark Burton and Depp seem to stop enjoying themselves and knuckle down to the task of churning out Harriet Potter Meets Pirates Of The Caribbean. The plot rapidly becomes confusing thereafter, since all events seem now to be issuing not from the need for a coherent and/or amusing narrative, but the necessity of stitching together a series of action set-pieces - culminating in Alice's armoured-up fight with a spark-breathing CGI dragon voiced by Christopher Lee.

More money than imagination has been thrown at this potentially dazzling and engaging revisitation of Carroll's classic, and the worst of it is that the film is hugely entertaining right up until it runs out of Lewis Carroll's ideas - it certainly has none of it own to offer.

I suppose Hollywood would not have paid for all Wonderland's extraordinary CGI effects without the Harry Potter factor being thrown into the mix, but that's a graft that such venerated material just can't take. In any case, the true movie magic  occurs here when the VFX wizards turn their hands to old favourites like the Red Queen (an adroit  turn by Helena Bonham Carter), with her impossibly large head, The Tweedles, within which CGI shroud Lucas proves perfect casting, and the gorgeously hypnotising Cheshire Cat.

As with Avatar, the 3D is effective enough, but the first half of Alice In Wonderland doesn't need it in order to delight…and the second half is beyond saving by means of such gimmicks.