Sleepy Hollow

viewed November 21, 1999 on video

For more information about this film, click here.

An immensely beautiful and quickly forgettable rendition of the Washington Irving story, with a lot of headless bodies and harmless camp signifying nothing.  Sized up among the profundity of scary movies this year, there is no horror here, nothing to chill the bone, just some obvious studio- and CGI-bound gothic artifice.  The fakeness of the sets has a beauty of its own, but calls to mind nothing more than its own uniqueness, with no lingering effects.  Disappointingly bound to a formulaic script from the writer of Seven, Tim Burton puts a lot of resources into a story that seems awfully slight.  A talented cast plays amiably with each other, as if they were cats declawed.  Depp plays an awkward, prudish Icabod Crane like an unintended impersonation of Hugh Grant.  It seems that since Ed Wood, Burton has settled for camp for camp's sake -- unlike his brilliant Batman, this time the struggle between a man-child with a supernatural villain doesn't touch any deeper than the surface.

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