.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

The following review was submitted by Nick Lam, a young aspiring film aficionado who e-mailed gregsrants.com looking for the opportunity to contribute reviews to the site offering a teenagers point of view. Look for further reviews from Nick in Nick's Niche on this web site.

There was something about Tim Burton films that continently disappointed me until he recently directed 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'. The guy definitely knows how to advertise, because for someone who hates most of his work, I've actually paid to see all of his films during this millennium with the exception of 'The World of Stainboy'.

The new addition to my array of "Tim-Burton-films-that-have-disappointed-me" is the recent 'Corpse Bride'. This time I'm extra disappointed, after loving 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory', I was hoping I had actually changed my mind about this guy. Nope. 'Corpse Bride' runs in at 75 minutes, yet it felt like a slow and boring 120.

The film tells the story through stop motion animation. It's about Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp), a real quiet and boring klutz. Victor has an arranged marriage in a day with Victoria Englot (Emily Watson). The film begins with the parents of both sides of the marriage, complaining or worrying about how the rehearsal for the wedding will go. Victor messes up and never gets his vows correctly, he then runs away into a forest where he finally gets his vows right while practicing and accidentally proposes to a corpse (Helena Bonham Carter). That corpse rises from the dead and is convinced that she is finally getting married.

The film deals with inner conflict as Victor loses his mind when he slowly falls in love with both the corpse and Victoria. We also get a hint at the typical rocky parent-child relationship that we see in all of Burton's films. The film really ends up feeling like the 'Shrek' films gone crazy, when Victor offers to kill himself to be able to marry the corpse.

The plot bored me after the first 20 minutes or so. The characters are pretty good, the voice acting is definitely a treat and the film was great to look at, the stop motion animation was definitely a breakthrough in this film but those didn't make up for the plot.

It felt like Burton was trying to overwhelm the audience with his creativeness just so that they wouldn't pay much attention to the overall plot which in my books was really, really boring. If you deprived Burton of his wacky style of filmmaking, I doubt he could make anything that people call a masterpiece, he has no versatility.

That being said, I can completely understand why any Burton fan would love this film. He's just not my style for the most part.

'Corpse Bride' is Burton's second stop motion animation film. Notice the word animation; let's take a look at the dictionary for a second here.

" an·i·ma·tion : The process or result of imparting life, interest, spirit, motion or activity. "

None of that worked for me in this movie except for the motion part. It's funny because for a movie that deals with death on such an epic level, this movie felt pretty dead itself for the last three quarters.