Poor Effort from Burton

Rating: 5/10 (30 November 2012)

I don't know what to make of this movie. I really don't. It tries to do so many things and ends up doing nothing. The plot is all over the place. There's a lot going on so it's hard to find the important details.
I've been a fan of Tim Burton as long as I can remember. I grew up watching his two Batman films, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands. I've followed his work from Pee-wee's Big Adventure through Big Fish. His recent efforts (Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland) have noticeably lacked his earlier charm. I've only been disappointed with two of his movies: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which was more due to how good the original is) and now Dark Shadows.
The movie is based on a Gothic soap opera from the 60s and 70s. Johnny Depp plays a vampire who awakes to find his dysfunctional descendants plagued by the witch who made him. I have very vague memories of the show, mostly when I caught the last five minutes while waiting for The Incredible Hulk on Sci-Fi Channel. I know little about the series, and it seems the movie is made for fans of the show with little effort to create new ones. Besides Barnabas and Angelique, there's little development in the other characters. They all have the occasional scene but nothing memorable. These seem mostly to reference some event in the show and not really help the movie in any significant way. Worse yet, Angelique makes a horrible villain. She has no reason to act other than she loves a man who doesn't love her. The whole time I kept waiting for some dynamic motivation that never appeared.
The movie is trying to be a comedy, Gothic horror, and romantic drama but never really succeeding at any. The problem is, anytime the movie starts getting into one particular genre it changes gears. The separate elements never really blend together. I understand that the show has a certain camp factor to it, but I've read that this was mostly unintentional. Perhaps if they had simply made it a comedic Hammer films style film, or romantic comedy, or Gothic romance. But the three together never work as a cohesive whole.
The finale (not really spoiling anything here) is representative of all the problems of the movie. By the time the third act came out I had somewhat zoned out. I knew what was going on, but simply didn't care. It felt like the movie was just going through a series of checkpoints but without any feeling. There are revelations that mostly come out of nowhere, but apparently are based on the show. The whole thing screams of committee filmmaking, like the studio put too many demands on the film without letting Burton be Burton. Either that, or since Depp and Burton were such fans of the show they tried to hit too many major story points and forgetting to make it into a single film. It's okay to cut stuff out for a sequel. The first Terminator and Indiana Jones films cut out material that they ended up putting into the second. It's okay to not include every single idea.
Had the movie stuck with the fish out of water story, this would have been great. The best scenes are Barnabas encountering "modern" life like roads, television, and pot-smoking hippies. Depp makes these moments quite hilarious. I found the line confusing McDonalds with Satan to be very effective.
The only really good thing about the movie is that Burton certainly has his unique look. He is definitely one of the most visually distinct directors out there, if not the most. Every frame of the movie has his visual stamp on it.
Honestly, I can't really recommend this to anyone. It's not even an okay-at-best effort from Burton like Alice in Wonderland was. The movie won't win over any new fans for the show. And fans of the show will probably find this to be little more than a overly-silly CliffNotes version. It's too dark to be a comedy and too silly to be a drama. The series is fondly remembered. The movie won't be.