Johnny Depp plays Ichabod Crane, who in this version of the classic tale is a New York policeman sent to the picturesque village of Sleepy Hollow, two days' journey up the Hudson River, where a number of locals have been reported beheaded. Lore has it that a beheaded Hessian horseman who was notoriously vicious in life has returned from the dead, galloping through the woods under cover of darkness and decapitating hapless villagers. Crane has arrived with every intention of dispelling this sort of foolish superstition. By the time he leaves, he has learned to believe.

It's too bad Burton isn't much of an action director. Sure, he's big on spectacle, but when it comes time to choreograph a big showpiece fistfight or chase scene for the camera, he can't quite invest it with the requisite sense of physicality. (This is one reason why the first Batman movie puts me to sleep.) This gives most of the beheadings that take place in Sleepy Hollow a detached quality -- they are almost certainly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I'd like them to be a little more lively. The marketing campaign (tagline: "Heads will roll") promised some chaotic wickedness along the lines of Burton's previous Mars Attacks!, a sensibility that is, to some extent, in evidence; still, while the scenes are technically impressive, they remain strangely uninvolving. (You'd think a stylist like Burton would be above the kind of shameless computer-animated ooga-booga that's used for a cheap shock in one scene, but you'd be wrong.)

More on-target are the grisly aftermaths of the murders, which are presented with a morbidly tongue-in-cheek sensibility. There's a certain gothic fascination in the sight of Crane kneeling next to a headless corpse, examining the reddish-pink tissue of an open neck. It's gruesome, but it's a friendly gruesomeness (Burton complained that his movie, which is exactly the sort of thing that healthy 13-year-old boys live for, was saddled with a restrictive R rating, rather than a PG-13, and he does have a point).

In counterpoint to these almost elegant visuals, the screenplay, by Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en, 8MM) is just too busy. Abandoning the premise of the original Washington Irving story, which posited the Headless Horseman as a morbid hoax perpetrated on gullible villagers, Walker positions the Horseman as a strictly supernatural phenomenon -- a fine idea, in itself. The dialogue is pleasantly stylized, but the story is hopelessly overwritten, drawing our attention away from the vengeful galloping ghost who's the film's centerpiece and into the banal convolutions of village life. It only gets worse as the tale goes on. Not only must we buy into some piffle about the horseman being controlled by one of the townspeople, but we're expected to care about their petty schemings and power plays, all this while there's a back-from-the-grave villain running around who's frankly much more interesting than any of them.

That the screenplay is so bloated with unnecessary contrivance is a particular shame in light of the various wonders that Burton and Co. have worked elsewhere. In terms of visuals, this picture is perhaps the most sure-footed of the year. It's photographed in shades of blue and slate-grey, with a bloody garnish the color of cherry pie. Johnny Depp appears as pale and frightened as the little boys who figure into the movie's backstory, and kudos are certainly due for the casting of an uncredited Christopher Walken as a distorted, silver-teethed rhyme to Depp's fragile handsomeness. Christina Ricci is even more delicate here than Depp, her round-eyed and childlike china-doll demeanor married to a potent yet unassuming sensuality. Late in the film, with her head pulled back and her throat in peril, we're convinced that something beautiful is in horrible danger. Sleepy Hollow could have done well with a rewrite that relied more on moments of such innate drama, and less on narrative convolution.