My big fat Dark Shadows review (spoilers ahead)

At the end of Dark Shadows, the witch Angelique is revealed to be nothing more than a hollow, damaged porcelain doll, a contraption that appears to be vaguely lifelike only if you don't look too closely. Angelique represents the failed aesthetics of this summer blockbuster better than its hero ever does: underwritten, overacted and almost entirely beside the point.

There's an amazing amount of talent represented on the screen, and not just in the cast. Dark Shadows is visually gorgeous, the music is powerful and, for the first time ever, Collinsport actually feels like a real town. Everything looks right, but the film's aggressively stupid script means the final product never rises above the level of conceptual pageantry.

And almost everything wrong with this movie has to do with its script by Seth Grahame-Smith, which wants to be everything to everyone as long as it doesn't take too much work. Entire characters could be edited from the film without altering the story to any noticeable degree. Roger Collins and Dr. Hoffman pass through the film without contributing anything to the cause, while the Collins children are asked to do nothing more than twiddle their thumbs until called upon to participate in the deus ex machina ending. There's so little going on in this movie that Alice Cooper has time to hang around to perform two songs.

The movie even begins with a juicy piece of editorial fat that could easily have been trimmed in writing. The opening "flashback" sequence is certainly attractive, but it serves no other purpose than to show us how Barnabas becomes a vampire and set up the film's romantic dynamic. Except that it really doesn't do that, either. Barnabas and Josette meet and fall in love between scenes, and Barnabas finds out he's a vampire about 30 seconds before being entombed by an angry mob for misdeeds we never get to witness. We are repeatedly told that Barnabas and Josette are OMG SO MUCH IN LOVE but are never given even one scene to make us believe in their romance. The movie cheats in the worst possible way by telling us what we should be feeling, instead of actually making us feel it. It's like a comedian telling us "I've got this joke about two guys and a talking duck, it's hilarious!" and then never sharing the joke.

I'll give credit to director Tim Burton for taking a gamble on this film, because it looks like nothing else you're going to see at the theater this summer. When Burton decided to become a director back in the '80s, the world didn't gain a great director as much as it lost an amazing production designer. Going as far back as Beetlejuice, Burton has had a long-standing problem with telling good scripts from bad. He's usually only as good as his script, and the script for Dark Shadows is terrible.

Beetlejuice was able to rise above its middling script problems, though, because it was funny (and having Michael Keaton as a secret weapon didn't hurt.) Very little humor in Dark Shadows works, and what does only works because of the actors selling it. Johnny Depp is surprisingly good in the role of Barnabas Collins, but he's especially good in the moment's quieter scenes. Barnabas is oblivious to his own obliviousness, which comes across as sad and funny in all the right ways when he's allowed to interact with the cast as something other than a running gag. Someone should tell screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith that "fish out of water" is only a character trait and not something on which you hang the framework of an entire movie.

The rest of the cast is hit-and-miss, undermined by the one-two punch of sketchy writing and ambivalent direction. A lot of the acting in this film is archly stilted, as though the actors are misguidedly trying to pay homage to a program they've never seen. Michelle Pfeiffer seems to be channeling Soap Acting 101 without ever sounding like anyone from the original Dark Shadows TV show. And Eva Green is miscast but endlessly energetic, so I find myself wanting to forgive her.

Ultimately, Dark Shadows feels quaint and oddly dated. Not because of its 1972 period setting, but because of its passive aggressive handling of a licensed property. When Burton came onto the scene in the late '80s, movies did whatever they wanted when adapting books, comics, TV shows, etc. An idea entered the "dream factory" and came out the other side looking like something very different. During the last decade, that attitude has gradually changed, with producers recognizing that the writers and artists who spent 40 years working on something like Captain America might be worth consulting for the film adaption. Burton's Dark Shadows seems like a throwback to the days when Hollywood looked at outside ideas like properties to be hostilely acquired. If you didn't completely remake the concept, then you ran the risk of having to share credit with whoever actually created it.

But you also need to leave yourself a little wiggle room, so that if the project goes tits up you still have the option of blaming the original property. If Dark Shadows fails at the box office, it will be interesting to see if Burton takes the heat, or if he passes the buck.