"Sleepy Hollow" is Tim Burton's mad fairy-tale nightmare, but it's not one to make you break out into a cold sweat, wishing you could turn on the lights or run to Mommy. Like many dreams, it's vivid at the time but instantly forgettable in the aftermath.
Never has Burton been so proficient at drawing you into his vision. "Sleepy Hollow" is a rush into the demented subconscious of a man raised on cartoons, dark comic books and bad horror movies. With dazzling beauty tempered by a chilling uneasiness, Burton plunges into a town paralyzed by fear, an eerie confection created entirely on sets in England. Even the flames in the fireplaces seem tentative, afraid to show their true colors.
Unfortunately, the clammy atmosphere seems to have spawned equally remote characters and thematic vacancy. Working with a script by Andrew Kevin Walker that ranges from adequate to lame, Burton gets little mileage out of the reinvention of Ichabod Crane into a twitchy New York constable sent upstate to investigate a grisly series of decapitations, which the locals attribute to the legendary headless horseman.
Like Batman, Ichabod (Johnny Depp) is an outsider at odds with the town he's supposed to save; he even has beautifully rendered flashbacks to a parent's death. While these memories explain Ichabod's commitment to science and reason over the supernatural, Burton and Depp delve only superficially into the cerebral constable's inner torment.
Once he examines the murder victims, it becomes clear that the scientific method cannot explain the slayings. And before too long, Ichabod comes face-to-neck with the horseman himself, negating any technique of apprehending the murderer that he may have learned in a criminology class.
(Before this encounter, Burton arbitrarily includes a tribute to a famous sequence from the Disney version of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," in which the horseman chases Ichabod with a flaming jack-o-lantern. Except it's not the horseman but a lunkheaded local in disguise, played by Casper Van Dien, trying to put a scare into the out-of-towner. This sequence relates in no way to anything else in the film, and feels as if it were inserted at the last minute.)
Once he's convinced of the demonic night rider's existence, Ichabod's mission becomes reductively clear: Find the headless horseman, stop the headless horseman. And soon this gets easier, as Ichabod discovers that the townfolk are pitted against each other in vaguely conspiratorial ways, none of which Walker's adaptation explains with any grace.
Could it be a coincidence that the horseman, a resurrected Hessian mercenary from the Revolutionary War, appears to have a hit list? Ichabod thinks not. For the record, the mad Hessian is played, in flashback, by Christopher Walken -- an interesting choice, considering he's the rare actor who's scarier with his head than without it.
Meanwhile, Ichabod has time to fall in love with Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of Sleepy Hollow's wealthiest citizen, played by a garishly miscast Christina Ricci. Known for scintillating, deadpan performances in such films as "The Ice Storm" and "The Opposite of Sex," Ricci captures no spark of personality as the archetypal blond love interest.
It doesn't help that the dialogue between Ichabod and Katrina finds Walker at his wooden worst. When, during one romantic exchange, the sound cut off, courtesy of the worst movie theater in Charlottesville, the Regal Seminole Square, I didn't feel like I was missing much.
Despite the muddled, slightly repetitive story and stilted romance, "Sleepy Hollow" remains alluring, occasionally even thrilling. There's only so much a ghostly, sword-wielding contract killer can do other than chase and eventually slice his victims. But there's plenty Burton can do with the chase sequences, and he keeps the film eminently watchable. As hollow as it is, you can't take your eyes off it.
Grade: B-
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