Tim Burton really used to be something. With “Beetlejuice,” “Batman,” “Ed Wood,” and “Edward Scissorhands,” the acclaimed director was known for his weird and wonderful work. While he still throws the occasional classic at us (the fantastic “Corpse Bride,” “Big Fish,” and the beautiful-to-look-at quirkfest “Alice In Wonderland”), “Dark Shadows” makes it abundantly clear the man seems to have given up on trying something that reaches beyond Johnny Depp in makeup and pretty sets. What a waste.
In this adaptation of the 1970’s soap opera, Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) is a wealthy fisherman/entrepreneur in 1776, until he sets off the wrath of a witch named Angelique (Eva Green) who turns him into a vampire and locks him in a coffin. He remains there for 200 years, until he is awakened in 1972 to an extremely strange land full of hippies, McDonalds and automobiles. With the help of his new descendants (including Michelle Pfieffer as the head of the household, Jackie Earl Haley as the groundskeeper and Chloe Grace Moretz as the angsty teenager) he hopes to defeat Angelique once and for all.
The biggest problem with “Dark Shadows” is the screenplay. Written by Seth-Graham Smith, the movie is messy and all over the place in terms of both tone and structure. What Barnabas truly wants is never entirely clear (a cure for his vampire condition? family? love? fame? good music?) and the family members that he resides with never move beyond archetypes, never becoming as weird and fleshed out as one would hope. The other issue I have with the screenplay is the fact that characters constantly move in and out of the film…Barnabas’ modern day love interest appears maybe twice in the film prior to the climax and the same goes for other so-called “important” characters. One can tell, thanks to too many narrated montages, this thing was obviously cut during editing, and thus, many of the characters hardly appear. Finally, the tone is never quite clear; it’s too depressing to be a comedy but it’s not suspenseful enough to become a great horror flick. Either way would have worked for this material, but the compromise feels entirely off.
The acting’s a mixed bag as well. Johnny Depp does fine, though I felt he channeled Jack Sparrow too much for my comfort. Eva Green does alright, though she becomes a bit much by the end. Michelle Pfieffer is surprisingly wooden in her role as the family patriarch. The real highlight is the meager cameo of Christopher Lee as a fisherman (look him up on IMDB. You’ll be amazed at his body of work). The sets are nice to look at, and a few gags work. However, a disheveled tone and a terrible screenplay keep “Dark Shadows” from truly becoming great. It’s not awful, but surely not something I’d recommend to see in the theater. All it needed was a bit more work, and maybe “Dark Shadows” could’ve really been worth sinking one’s teeth into.
