Slow pacing, empty story keep "Dark Shadows" from ever delivering any real excitement

Rating: 4/10 (14 May 2012)

With last week's The Avengers shattering box office records, it's safe to say the summer blockbuster season has started. While 2011′s blockbusters failed to bust any blocks, this year is shaping up to be almost too overloaded with highly anticipated films coming out one week after the other. Among them is Tim Burton's eighth collaboration with his muse, Johnny Depp, in the film adaptation of Dark Shadows, a cult soap opera from the late 60s. Unfortunately, the film doesn't quite live up to the expectations some may have had, and instead we are given a slow, surprisingly dull, melodramatic film that never really commits itself to be funny or scary, and ends up being neither.
What should be addressed first is the fact that this is an adaptation of a soap opera. While I don't necessarily subscribe to the belief that there are some films that should be aborted before they are ever produced (I think with the right finesse, any film has the potential to be good), this is one adaptation that seems just a tad unnecessary, especially since a couple movies and a few television reboots (one starring a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt) have already been made. I understand Depp and Burton were both big fans of the show, and I understand that there is a cult following. But the problem you run into when you adapt a soap opera is that soap operas are not all that visually interesting to begin with. That is not to say that the film itself is visually boring. In fact, that's all it really has going for it most of the time. But there is very little action or story progression in a soap, and the languid pace of a daily daytime television series seems to have found its way into this adaptation.
In screen writing, it's a well known lesson to avoid scenes where characters do nothing more than talk to each other. It's referred to as "talking heads" and it's one of the least interesting ways to present characters or story to your audience. This is all soap operas do, mostly due to the fact that they have to drag out a story for five episodes every week. And that's the trap the film Dark Shadows falls into. In its close to two hour running time, it feels like nothing really happens to anyone. Characters barely change, the conflict barely rises, and in the end, it all feels rushed to have some sort of resolution. In my opinion, these problems all stem from the source material. Even with its 1,225 episodes, there simply isn't enough happening in the story to support a film.
To read the rest of the review (IMDb form too short) visit: http://custodianfilmcritic.com/dark- shadows/