Not horror, just horrible

Rating: 3/10 (24 November 1999)

I had high expectations for Sleepy Hollow because of Tim Burton's previous work and the intriguing trailer, which promised a very macabre, eerie take on the Washington Irving tale. The story supplies plenty of raw material for a director interested in examining fear, jealousy, superstition and the dark side of human nature. Instead, what I saw was just another effects-driven big-budget waste of time. Way too much emphasis was placed on creating the spooky atmosphere - how many shots of fog, storm clouds and bare trees do we need to see? OK, Tim, we get it - Sleepy Hollow is a gloomy place. Now would someone please light a lantern and get on with the story? The village is so damp and dreary I'm surprised everyone didn't die of pneumonia before the Headless Horseman ever showed up.
The screenplay seems to exist solely for the purpose of creating opportunities to spend more special effects dollars, but even the goriest scenes are not frightening. There's no mystery here. We know that before long Mr. Headless will show up again and lop the head off some character. His scenes reminded me of the knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
The dialogue is stilted and phony. And wasn't it odd that Miranda Richardson adopted a convincing American accent while other cast members, especially Johnny Depp, put on awful Brit accents? Depp was just plain bad. His Ichabod Crane is a campy, foppish twit. He looks silly pursing his lips with all the color drained from his face.
The screenwriters have tried to turn this into some sort of murder mystery, but the plot is so needlessly complicated that we don't know or care why people are being whacked. The tale would have been better served by writers who know how to craft a tight, suspenseful story. A big disappointment.