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Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is a pretty 15-year-old girl who spends her idle moments in her parents' back yard, dressed as a fairy princess and talking to herself. Her parents seem very tolerant of this behavior, only asking that she do her chores and watch over her baby brother Toby while they’re away. Sarah responds by throwing fits, smack talking and manhandling the infant as soon as Mom and Dad step out the door. Inspired by her favorite fantasy book, Sarah then prays to the Invisible Goblin King Jareth to whisk the screaming child away to the nether regions of Goblin Hell. This is exactly what happens, as rock legend David Bowie swoops in through an open window, fondling a snow globe and struggling to breathe in a sinfully tight pair of spandex pants. Sarah pleads with the smirking Ziggy Stardust to return her brother, no doubt feeling guilty for screaming directly into the child’s face as she arranged his abduction. But according to Jareth, if Sarah wants to see little Toby again she has 13 hours to navigate a deadly Labyrinth (a fancy word for “maze”), and take the boy from Castle Bowie herself.

Sarah vows to do just that and sets off on her adventure, aided by a curious cast of scheming, wisecracking and altogether obnoxiously hairy Muppets. Some are friendly, some are frustrating, but all of them are a welcome distraction from Sarah’s self indulgent simpering. This is more or less a fractured retelling of Alice in Wonderland, if Alice were a shrieking bitch and Wonderland were ruled by an effeminate weirdo who kidnapped babies, wrote songs about it, and then gleefully performed those songs in front of his tiny, wailing victims. The irony here is that many of the reasons I dislike Alice in Wonderland apply directly to Labyrinth. “Alice” is a semi nonsensical narrative full of allusion and allegory whose exact points of reference went to the grave with their creator. To me, the original version of that story is like a song whose lyrics mean nothing to anyone but the person who wrote them. That’s excusable, provided you at least come away entertained.

But in the case of Labyrinth I was not entertained, and there is no excuse. The plot is essentially a low rent Dungeons and Dragons expedition where you take virtually naked characters through a tedious shopping list of repetitive tasks, hoping to acquire enough skill and equipment to win the real fight, which comes at the end. This is fine if you’re sitting around your parents' basement in high school, rolling dice and drinking Mountain Dew with your dorky friends. The concept works less well when asked to bear the weight of a full length movie. If you’re going to ask even an audience of children to invest in your story there needs to be ebb and flow, forward motion that makes the viewer feel involved in the action and worried about the stakes. At no point during Labyrinth do I feel much of anything other than a desperate desire for it to make some kind of sense.

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