A Tim Burton film, for certain, from start to finish and top to bottom. The reimagination of Washington Irving's urbane folktale as a turn-of-the-century murder mystery (that's the Eighteenth turning to the Nineteenth), with Ichabod Crane transformed from a superstitious country schoolteacher into a forward-thinking big-city detective sent to the hinterlands to solve an apparent case of the supernatural ("Their heads were not found severed. Their heads were not found at all"), allows our film-buff director to pay homage to the Hammer horrors of the Fifties and Sixties, much as he paid homage in Edward Scissorhands to the Universal horrors of the Thirties and Forties. (Small parts for Christopher Lee and Michael Gough establish a direct link to Hammer.) The battle lines between science and religion, reason and faith, are well drawn, and Johnny Depp as the self-assured rationalist does not -- except when he spies a spider in his bedroom -- give up his dignity as he is forced to give ground. The titular village and the Hansel-and-Gretel woods around it, depicted in the bleak brooding palette of a Caspar David Friedrich, lack only a vampire's castle. (The witch's cave will have to suffice.) The clothes, the faces, the wigs are pure storybook, and the innumerable beheadings are as clean and convincing as computer animation can manage. (Splendid effect when the midwife's rolling head finally comes to rest, its eyes staring through a crack in the floorboards at her tiny son cowering below.) In all matters tangible, you couldn't ask for more. You could maybe ask for less. In the end, it is simply too much of a good thing, too much of the same thing over and over again, too little of any other kind of thing. Burton's naughty-boy prankishness precludes any sustained intensity, and the Terminator-like (or if you prefer, Michael Myers-like) unstoppability of the Headless Horseman gets to be a bore. Danny Elfman's equally unstoppable music provides no remedy. It gets old in a hurry, if it was not old to begin with, and by the finish it has passed through the inevitable stages of death and putrefaction. Christina Ricci, Michael Gambon, Miranda Richardson, Christopher Walken. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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