More like "SLOPPY Hollow"

Rating: 4/10 (23 September 2000)

All dressed up with no place to go. Sure, Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow" is absolutely gorgeous to look at, but the script is cluttered and perfunctory and there is no suspense at all. A great disappointment. This version takes a practically foolproof story and tells it badly. It astonishes me the way viewers will so frequently be duped by movies that look "cool" but have no substance, no vitality, no reason for being. The plot is by no means "complex" as some other comments have asserted, it's just badly confused. There is no sense of mystery, no sense of awe of the supernatural that made Washington Irving's source material so timeless. There is none of that here. Instead, we yawn as a series of poorly drawn, interchangeable characters get their heads lopped off by the leaden, mechanical horseman - a villain about as scary (as depicted here) as Prince Charles riding around playing polo at night. Then, once you see him without his horse, lumbering around in pursuit of victims on foot, you really have to scratch your head. How can Burton not know that the Horseman has to always be kept somewhere in the shadows and on horseback to function as a legendary ghoul and the stuff of nightmares? You put him right out in the open and he's as common and scary as a tax collector going door to door.
The cast is mostly uncertain. That is the thing that stands out the most in bad movies: the uncertain, purposeless look on actors' faces as they struggle to find their characters' motivation; something, anything to grab onto. Christina Ricci does a lot of that here. She simply looks like someone who isn't quite sure. The child actor Marc Pickering as Young Masbath, Ichabod's young protege, fares even worse. Burton was obviously looking for someone (who looks quite a bit like he himself must have looked as a child, incidentally) with an unschooled quality, but one always gets the uneasy feeling when the boy's on screen that he's just as likely to wander over to some piece of film equipment and inquire "What's this do?"
Burton favorite Jeffrey Jones? Stands around in the shadows during his brief time on screen waiting for scraps of boring exposition to be thrown his way. Caspar Van Dien? Completely wasted as Bram Van Brunt, who should be Ichabod's romantic rival for Ricci's affections and dark antagonist, but cluelessly marginalized here. Miranda Richardson, one of the most highly regarded actresses of her generation? Amazingly, she gives a terrible performance, with contemporary sounding line readings that are totally out of sync with the time period (1800).
Then there's Johnny Depp as Ichabod. At least he is trying to have some fun with the part and doesn't sleepwalk through it the way he did so maladroitly in "The Astronaut's Wife". The prissy mannerisms, the always slightly ruffled air - there is a texture to his performance that at times fits nicely with the film's fetishistically textured visuals. This helps for a while, but he is ultimately hobbled by the weak, unimaginative dialogue he is too often given to speak and a character so diluted and distorted from Irving's original that his Ichabod appears to the audience as irreconcilable fragments, not a whole.
I had wondered last year why this movie, which had such an enormous opening week, dribbled to a final U.S. take of only around $100 million. Now I see why. Bad word of mouth. In film after film after film these days, with their bombastic soundtracks, schizophrenic editing and overheated direction; I form the same image in my head as I'm watching them self-destruct in front of me: that of an incompetent clown flubbing his juggling routine badly but smiling out upon his audience just the same with all too eager eyes.