What a waste!

Rating: 4/10 (26 August 2007)

"Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice - wherefore art thou, Beetlejuice?" That's actually a line from the Saturday morning cartoon show spun off from the original Beetlejuice movie - which is among one of the hippest cartoon shows ever made. As an ongoing series, it was able to develop the Land of the Dead, which could only appear as a back-drop in the original film, as a complete alternate universe. And it took chances - Beetlejuice ate bugs and vomited and even farted a couple times, while his Goth Earthling friend expressed her contempt for the boringly routine lives of her parents. It was an exercise in bad-taste-as-comic-gestalt, and it was targeted to young people mature enough to get in on the joke.
All of this is exactly what is lacking in "The Corpse Bride". Given an opportunity to recreate the Land of the dead as a completely realized world unto itself, one would expect Burton to really give us a world we should like to visit (even if we also want to sure to leave anytime we wanted). Instead, Deadland here is again treated as a back-drop. And the story that unfolds before it is harmlessly sentimentalized and neither scary nor funny.
Two definitive moments: Johnny Depp's character, supposedly a chief protagonist in the film, is not very smart, not hip at all, and incredibly wishy-washy - a complete waste of the vocal talents of Mr Depp. Second, the film's villain - a lame, predictable stereotype - if you have seen a couple Disney cartoons made after WWII, you could probably write all of his lines without seeing this film.
What a waste! And stop-motion being as difficult as it is, it's entirely incomprehensible why Burton would throw it all away on such a wholly mediocre story with such dull, unattractive characters.
The really sad thing is, this is aimed at children - but not the young hipsters who enjoyed the Beetlejuice cartoon show, but the great unwashed of Middle America, where people still think evolution is a dangerous idea.
I suppose that, for children, this is harmless enough - but who wants a harmless movie about the Land of the Dead from Tim Burton? What a waste!