headless plot, wasted actors.

Rating: 2/10 (28 January 2001)

A screenplay appropriate to the teenage male, and very likely
written by one: half-begun themes (principle, torture, witchcraft)
sacrificed to cheap special effects (how many heads do we really
have to see roll?). Any stroke of axe or Heath Robinson device
spurts blood precisely into the wielder's face; yet the level of gore
(blood spurting from each nailhole of a victim of the iron Maiden) is
marginally too great to support the only kind interpretation of this
film, that it is supposed to be funny. Lines of development so
poorly handled that characters must stop and catch the audience
up with the plot, as in some detective farce.
And what a romp it might have been: rarely can so many great
actors - for the supporting cast is potentially superb - have stood
around with so little to do. Not including Mr Depp, kept very busy,
who equates acting with swallowing to express fear, etc etc,
unfunny and untrained in pastiche, inadequate to attempting the
themes that first informed this abandoned script.
Kudos to the headless horseman, for twirling his axe in the only
act of real gusto in a long evening. And to the sets, that save this
failure from a bomb. Sympathies for the supporting cast, who
should have been left on their own to fashion a farce, or an
adventure, or even a drama, which this certainly is not.