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The problem with “Alice” is its lack of narrative imagination.

As demonstrated in his first two “Muppets” features, he’s got fine comic timing, and his ability to handle nonstop digital spectacle keeps “Alice” visually consistent and coherent even as it offers one spread of eye-candy after another. But as Carroll himself put it, “it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” While he can’t really offer a substitute for the dark wit that Burton brings even to his lesser outings, new director Bobin is hardly out of his element. Though it’s unlikely to equal the billion-dollar-plus worldwide tally of its 2010 predecessor, “Looking Glass” should fare well enough commercially, thanks to its day-glow production design, busy CGI and assorted other shiny things. “The ‘why?’ cannot, and need not, be put into words.” So wrote Lewis Carroll in the introduction to “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” and his advice goes sadly unheeded in “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” James Bobin’s sequel to Tim Burton’s massively lucrative “Alice in Wonderland.” Taking Carroll’s anything-goes psychedelic setting and painting it over with a drab time-travel plot and thoroughly beige origin stories for otherwise colorful characters, this lackluster go-round is a mercenary backward step for Disney’s live-action excavations of its animated back catalog, which enjoyed a mighty leap forward only a few weeks ago with Jon Favreau’s “The Jungle Book.”

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