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Go see 'Sleepy Hollow,' but watch your head

Sleepy Hollow is not an innocent update of the traditional Washington Irving tale best known as an animated Disney movie. It is most definitely not for children or anyone faint of heart. The director, Tim Burton, took the core of the original story and recast it as his own distinct creation.

The film begins with a gruesome murder of the wealthiest citizen of Sleepy Hollow while he is traveling in a stage coach down an ominous forest road. The method of the murder? Beheading. When Constable Ichabod Crane arrives from New York to investigate, he learns that this is just one in a series of such murders, all marked by the method of execution and the fact that the heads are missing.

He immediately launches into an investigation of the murders, and the film proceeds in a whodunit manner. While the townspeople are sure that a ghoulish headless horseman is removing the heads, Ichabod remains convinced that science will reveal the murderer to be a human.

There are some notable changes from earlier versions of Sleepy Hollow. Ichabod, while still a coward, is now a Constable instead of a school teacher. The classic scene from the Disney cartoon where a horseman rides down Ichabod and throws a flaming pumpkin at him is preserved. The horseman, however, has been changed from a terrifying legend into the murdering ghost of a dead Hessian soldier.

The weaknesses in Sleepy Hollow are due mostly to the script and the length of the film. The director leaves a few of the sub-plots woefully unexplored so that they don't impede the horrors of the main plot. Specifically, Crane's romance with Katrina Van Tassel is not fully developed, making the scene where they kiss seem contrived. When Crane arrives in Sleepy Hollow, he receives a kiss from the blindfolded Katrina, angering her boyfriend, Brom. In traditional versions of the story, the tension between Crane and Brom is a major focus of the plot.

The director sacrifices the subplots in order to focus on the complex whodunit-style main plot which turns out to be excessively complicated. At the end of the film we are left trying to piece together what exactly happened because the chain of events Crane uncovers is just too confusing, with too many involved characters and events.

As with previous films, Burton tries to explore the motivations of the central character. At the start of the film, Crane attempts to promote scientific methods of crime investigation as opposed to torture. During the remainder of the film, the director exposes us to the character's past through dream sequences, dialogue, and visual clues. Crane doesn't fully reveal his dark past before the climax of the film. While this psychological exploration is fascinating, like the subplots, it is underdeveloped.

Despite the disjointed focus on Crane, Johnny Depp delivers a decent performance. He does an excellent job of portraying a cowardly hero, a tough role. He manages to portray the seemingly contradictory states in a way that brings much needed levity to otherwise ominous scenes. A well-timed faint can really lighten up a scene in which someone has just been taken to hell by the horseman.

Tim Burton shines in the areas where he always does. The film is heavily stylized in a traditional Tim Burton manner. The village of Sleepy Hollow looks exactly as a spooky late 18th Century village should. The sun never shines and the village looks perpetually gloomy and depressing, as if it has a plague hanging over it. Despite the dark nature of the location, everything is sharp, clean, and perfectly defined.

The special effects, while not overly ambitious, are air tight. Everything seems perfectly realistic. The decapitations are all the more disturbing for their realism and the headless horseman is terrifyingly realized. Given the supernatural nature of the film, all of the effects look completely convincing.

Despite the problems, the film is well done and entertaining. If you don't have a strong stomach, you might want to steer clear, as this is one of the most disturbingly graphic films I have ever seen. If you can stomach it, it is an innovative take on a classic American ghost story.