Bad writing decapitates ambitious effort

Rating: 5/10 (19 November 1999)

Tim Burton's adaptation can't quite settle on a course to take to achieve it's ends: Either he'd picked which special effects he wanted to use and let his screenwriters wind their way through a plot to use them, or he simply let the script rest in the hands of two incompetents, hoping the flashy substance would make up for it. Unfortunately, it does not. The film can't settle on being a spoof of itself or a truly shocking film or even a serious detective story, and while Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci try to figure out which way to act it, we get bored waiting...