For the
sake of not having to write the same intro a million
different ways throughout the rest of time, just know that
this column avoids the overly long and sometimes dull
process of full film reviews and instead opts to break
things down based on what I thought going in, what happened
while I was there and what I learned at the end of it all.
Thanks for reading!
The
Breakdown - Dark Shadows
The Impression:
Tim Burton indulges in a truly bizarre dream project by
adapting a cult-favorite television show from the 1980s ...
a friend of mine told me, "It’s so terribly made, it’s
pretty awesome." This is going to be a giant flop.
The Reality:
For two-thirds of Dark Shadows, there’s hope that Tim
Burton escaped from the dark cell his captors have been
holding him in, fought off the eerily realistic clone that’s
been sullying his name for the last ten or so years, and
actually managed to create a film that seemed more in line
with his classics (Beetlejuice, Edward
Scissorhands, Ed Wood) than his recent
abominations. Johnny Depp plays Barnabus Collins, a 17th
century businessman who’s cursed by a spurned lover (Eva
Green) to be a vampire, buried alive and woken again in the
1970s to try to fix all that has wronged his once noble
family. For a daunting length Burton and Depp manage to keep
attention solely based on the, admittedly, enjoyable
character interactions. Barnabus Collins is the newest in a
long line of very similar Johnny Depp characters, but
somehow this stuffy aristocrat seems only mostly played out
(almost entirely in the moments when Burton and company flog
the age-old fish-out-of-water "the 70s were trippy" humor -
which they do, a lot) and Depp is able to wring a few truly
solid scenes, especially, in the early bits of the film,
with Helena Bonham Carter's Dr. Hoffman. And though
enjoyable, somewhere at the two-thirds mark it suddenly
dawned on me that nothing had happened in the film, that
what I was watching was a loosely stitched together
collection of scenes that yes, showcased the kooky world of
the Collins family, but didn’t actually aim to progress any
sort of storyline. At first it seems, perhaps Burton is
aping the meandering ways of bad television in some sort of
meta play on the original series, but when the film comes
shuddering to a halt with a prolonged and confusing action
scene, the truth comes to the surface - Burton has as little
idea what to do with the film as anyone watching it. Though
it starts promising, even playing up an oddball crudeness I
thought Burton had let die, it ends with bafflement,
prompting this viewer to look back and see nothing worth
recommending.
The Lesson:
Mr. Burton, your clone lives on.
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