A not very legendary adaptation

Rating: 5/10 (19 January 2000)

I am a great fan of Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice and Mars Attacks, so I looked forward to seeing what dark, creepy bent Tim Burton could put on this American literary classic. Well, dark and creepy it certainly is, but absorbing and powerful it unfortunately is not.
This film promises a lot from the beginning, but it sadly fails to convert all the elements into a cohesive whole. The plot is tangled and clumsy and hardly does justice to the elegant legend of Ichabod Crane and his headless Nemesis. In the end it is scarcely of interest who inherits what and who is trying to bop off whom.
The characters, apart from the very interesting' Ichabod Crane, played with just the right amount of self-parody by Johnny Depp, are dull and sloppily drawn and the film needs a good juicy villain to spice things up a bit and balance the ensemble. Depp is an inspired piece of casting and really makes this film almost worth seeing, although he limits his facial expressions to the fingers of one hand. This is however five more than those managed by Christina Ricci, who struggles both with her character and the period setting throughout and really looks totally out of place. The other characters are unremarkable.
I am sure Tim Burton could have pulled something special off here, but he has a poor script to work with, and somewhere in this production he realizes it and loses faith. Even the themes of science vs magic, city versus country, reason over emotion, are introduced but never developed properly and the whole thing just peters out about halfway through. The film felt long even though it was well under two hours.
The photography and the production design save it from total disaster, though. Both these are terrific, and the effects are gruesome but appropriate. Such a pity that the story and characters do not live up to the setting. As they say, fifty percent script, thirty percent casting, and then there's the rest. Well, the rest isn't enough here.
Could have been, but isn't . . .