Dark Shadows (2012)

I think it’s pretty official that director Tim Burton has lost the magic touch that shaped his masterpieces like Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, as well as that great imagination that had him being praised as one of the great cinematic visionaries of the age. Watching his newest film, Dark Shadows, is a very uncomfortable experience, not unlike what I felt while watching his last feature, Alice in Wonderland. It almost feels like watching the parody of a Tim Burton movie. The material should have suited him. The screenplay was written by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies author Seth Gordon-Grahame who adapted it from the popular TV show I know nothing about. The story involves a man from two hundred years ago who has been turned into a vampire by a witch who also locks him in a steel box, all because he doesn’t love her. He wakes up in the 70s and tries to restore his family’s deteriorating wealth and also fight off the same witch, still alive and furious.

One thing I do know about the show is that it is a soap-style drama and not a comedy like this movie. I seriously question the decision to make this a joke-fest, mostly because Burton seems so scatterbrained these days that he slips in a great deal of missed opportunities. Many scenes that have the potential to be amusing are passed over with nary a wink, things like Barnabas the vampire first walking through the technologically advanced streets and his extended scene with a group of hippies, which is actually put to dramatic use for some reason. Everything in the movie is set-up, happening just out of reach. We try to enjoy ourselves and keep getting let down. Of course the movie stars Johnny Depp, an actor Burton likes to use so desperately that he often makes his characters more zany than they should be to suit his particular talents. Here, Depp is strangely stiff, obviously in on the joke, but playing it straighter than the movie needed. In other words, he and the rest of the cast is wasted as everyone involved tries to grasp some sort of entertaining reason for this movie to exist, with rickety results.

One aspect that expectedly works well is the art design, which is appropriately impressive in its eeriness, but for an invisible purpose. This is a movie that has Alice Cooper in a cameo appearance simply for a throwaway joke where Barnabas calls him the ugliest woman he’s ever seen. This is a movie where main characters come and go at random, other characters do things out of plot necessity even though they make no sense, important subplots are abandoned willy-nilly, and absolutely nothing funny happens.  The really disappointing thing about Dark Shadows is that the same project in different hands probably would have been much better, and these used to be very capable hands. The truth is that even die-hard fans of the source or the creators will find nothing good here. It’s sad to think that Hollywood is in a stage where an idea this fantastic and whimsical can still come up so boring and pointless.

4/10