Brad's Take: Dark Shadows - **

Dark Shadows begins as a comedy that isn't all that funny and ends as a thriller that isn't all that thrilling. Tim Burton's new Johnny Depp make-up showcase is as routine as it gets, pinning the actor under so much artifice that it's a testament to his talent, and maybe even a cry for help from the actor himself, that he manages to make anything of the drab material placed before him. Such has their working relationship been for the past decade; why should this be any different?

A real Who Cares? plot, if I've ever seen one, Shadows has Depp playing Barnabas Collins, a wealthy 18th century fishery heir who spurns the advances of the sexy witch of a housekeeper, Angelique (Eva Green), and is cursed into vampirism and locked in a buried coffin until dug up two centuries later in 1972. There, then, he tries to revive the family business, only to find Angie his chief rival. From there the tame antics ensue. I'm not sure if Burton thought a waterfront seafood cannery operation was an ironic choice of focus for a Gothic vampire "comedy," or if it is a leftover relic from the campy 70s television show, but whatever the reason it should have been scrapped in the second draft. But fear not, for Burton does not linger on any one thing long enough for it to become too boring in and of itself... he leaves that for the film as a whole.

I don't know if it's just me, or if it's a recent trend that characters seem to lack dimension unless you're wearing silly glasses, but Dark Shadows had me desperate for someone to grasp onto. Each character, including Depp's Barnabas, is crudely drawn, only demanding our attention when they are saying something funny, which isn't nearly often enough to justify a running time approaching two hours. And most of the comedy stems from pointing out anachronisms between the two centuries, and Barney's antiquated rhetoric as he describes everyday objects: "Curious terrain," he says while skeptically prodding a street with the toe of his shoe. I don't know how that comes across in print, but it did force a chuckle from me. Like it or not, them's the jokes in Dark Shadows.

I have not seen the original show on which this film is based, but it feels to me that it misses the mark. Similar to other recent adaptations of campy, decades-old television shows, like 2010's A-Team, Burton's Dark Shadows feels like he doesn't understand his source material, or what strange combination of charm and camp made it appealing to anybody. That or he does know and chose to ignore it. Again, I say that without ever having seen the original, but if the show was anything like the film, I can't imagine why anyone would ask for a $150 million dollar CGI fueled film adaptation forty years later but, unfortunately for us, somebody did... And Tim Burton delivered.