Beautiful disappointment

Rating: 5/10 (20 January 2000)

I would watch this film again, but when I finally got to see it the first time, I was severely disappoints. The film is extremely sumptuous to look at and Burton's 1799 New York is remarkable, as are the torture chambers and the whole town of Sleepy Hollow. The acting, too, is uniformly fine. I would not expect Depp and Ricci to be speaking in accents, but the become almost unrecognizably absorbed into their characters, as do the character actors in support. Unfortunately, the way the plot spun from the pen of B-movie maestro Kevin Yagher, in which in ends up, in its last third or so, a lame revenge plot with by the numbers mistaken attribution, discovery, and resolution, that I thought were so trite that I really didn't care. Perhaps a more Brechtian acting style would have helped make it through this part, better, but the Delsartian performance of the culprit late in the film makes it silly. Adherence to Irving was thrown out the window as a given as soon as it was announced, but what sounded like improvements turned out to be Hollywoodization, with little sense of parody, other than quoting _On the Town_. In the story, Katrina married Brom van Brunt, who is here hacked in half by the Headless Horseman, though it is Brom who throws the pumpkin at Ichabod, something only hinted at on the last page of the story. It would have been nice to see more action from Ray Park's Headless Horseman when he's attacking, but we don't seem to get all that much, while by the end he's acting like a lame pastiche of Burton's own _Batman_ in a lame pastiche of James Whale's _Frankenstein_. Burton did that better when he was tongue-in-cheek in _Frankenweenie_.
Unfortunately, this film resonated with me as all gloss and no substance, mainly due to the ending, because that really isn't the case, early on, even though it still could have used more depth. It seemed saturated with references to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films as well, which would be okay if it actually did something with that. Burton also made strange choices as to when and when not to show a graphic decapitation, so that whenever one isn't shown, it seems anticlimactic. The torture chambers and maltreatment of witches seems to be more of introducing a plot point than trying to say anything. In short, were the ending less trite, this film would be a thoroughly entertaining, if relatively empty film (even _Batman_ was deeper than this). As such, it was a disappointment in several ways. This is Burton's most beautiful, but least meaningful, film.