Dark Shadows
Directed by Tim Burton
Starring Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfieffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Jackie Earle Haley
Rated PG-13 (horror violence, language/sexual references, drug content, some sexuality)
Ah, Mr. Burton, we meet again.
Alice in Wonderland was a fucking disaster, so this time around, with Dark
Shadows, I hoped to be pleasantly surprised. It…confused me, most of all.
Based on the 1970s horror soap
opera, Dark Shadows stars Tim Burton slaves Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham
Carter as well as numerous other stars famous for being mildly creepy. Just look at Eva Green's goofy gangly toothed-smile. Depp does the best with his role, which is unfortunately rduced to the
same one-joke performance Danny McBride and James Franco had to force
themselves through with “Your Highness”- out-of-place dialogue due to time
displacement. Barnabas Collins is a vampire who just woke up after 200 years in
a coffin and sets about helping his family’s descendants restore their pride
and kill an evil witch…he speaks like a British man using ye olde English. It’s
a fish out of water tale.
The movie is unfortunately a
comedy. Burton isn’t very funny unless he takes it totally black or totally
cartoony, and when he tries to find a middle ground like this or Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory, he fails miserably. Burton can do creepy and gothic, but
he spends more time in Dark Shadows trying to shoehorn every recognizable 70s
track into the background and play up the “fish out of water” aspect of the
story over and over again. The movie feels recycled, basically following a set
pattern of Depp going off into the 1970s world, which resembles more a parody
of the 70s than the actual 70s, he goes back home and does some gross vampiric
spooky thing, and then the side characters have their own little story.
The side characters, specifically
the young David and Barnabas' love interest Victoria, are the best part of the movie. They have these neat little
supernatural tragic backstories that offer the best moments, where Burton shows
us that he can still make an effectively creepy scene or two. The gothic aspect
of the source material only comes out in about a third of the film, and
sections dedicated to moving the story forward feel like an afterthought to get
to the next set piece.
The movie does have a couple good
ones, with the ridiculous shark-jumping monster mash that is the finale
actually being one of the better moments in spite of plot twists that come out
of nowhere. It makes me wish the whole movie was chock full of ghosts and
witches and vampires and werewolves instead of mostly being about how Barnabas
talks about sex or wonders at McDonalds. The film pushes implausibility to the
boundaries because Barnabas is oh-so obviously a vampire. Sure, he has a really
dumb hypnotic vampire spell thing he does that resembles a Jedi mind trick, but
that can’t possibly account for all the people that have seen him in his
ridiculous Burtonized getup of googly sunglasses and comically large umbrella.
It’s a mediocre movie. It isn’t
offensively bad, but it is definitely incompetent for most of the time. Burton
needs to go back to making original films instead of remaking shit (including
remaking his own goddamn movies). Maybe it’s time to give it a rest.
C
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