Movie Reviews

Dark Shadows a Tim Burton Film

User Rating:  / 0

Details

Written by Jonathan Jacobs

Johnny Depp is the world's most popular buffoon, other than Barak Hussein Obama of course. He prides himself on portraying conflicted characters doused in woman's makeup and then prances around like a ballerina. Every once in a while he surfaces to play a normal role and then falls back into shadow, pun intended.

Helena Bonham Carter has no business being on a movie screen. She is vulgar, unattractive and not a little bit overhyped. On the other hand, Eva Green (Angelique Brouchard) is quite the antithesis of Bonham Carter. Green is not only a Bond girl, she is also a great actress. It is her awkward beauty and devotion to character that makes her so much fun to watch.

Dark Shadows is a film about a romantic (Depp portraying Barnabas Collins) that is tortured for centuries by a spurned lover (Angelique). In the middle of a romance with his true love Angelique exacts her revenge by hypnotizing his lover (Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters and Josette DuPres) into jumping off a jagged cliff. When Barnabas, in an act of mindless romanticism, jumps to his death to be with his beloved in the afterlife, the wicked witch condemns him to immortality as a vampire a mere instant before smashing against the surf. Angelique then has the townspeople cruelly encage him in a coffin and buried for over two centuries. When Barnabas regains his freedom from the coffin-cage, he finds a world that has changed and a town that has abandoned his formerly revered family. Instead of following the Collins, the towns folk have grown accustomed to the witch's wily ways.

The humor is always too little too late in Dark Shadows. It is epically boring and unimaginative. Tim Burton's dream is the audience's nightmare because they paid good money to see a whole lot of nothing. The film plays at being grand and intense but it is really stale and pointless. I love to laugh and even at my best the jokes passed me by like a high-speed train. Carter is becoming foolish in her quest to balance vulgarity with her inner ComiCon.  Depp is overplaying his hand here simply to be recognized as a producer (albeit a lucrative over-played hand to be sure). Pfeiffer (the family matriarch in the 1970s) is what she is (an aging woman that will accept any role). Mostly, the blame falls squarely on Burton's shoulders. Save Eva Green's super hot wickedness, Dark Shadows is a colossal bust (no pun intended cleavage fans). Two witch's tits down and not on account of gravity's fickle behavior.  

• < Prev
• Next >