THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

You can’t pin the disaster of Cops and Robbersons on Chevy Chase. He’s doing the routine everyone already knows by heart. He’s the hapless suburban dad who wrecks every situation he gets into simply by showing up. While he can still squeeze a laugh or two out of the voids the script leaves between its misfired gags, this movie sinks anyway. Its fatal flaw being what should have been its main selling point. That is, the pairing between him and Jack Palance. The granite scowl pitted against flailing slapstick should have combusted. But instead, what we get has all the energy of a wet sponge. This is a film that feels like it strains for chemistry, but all it can manage is a pathetic fizzle.

Chase plays Norman Robberson, a Clark Griswold incarnate: idiotic, overeager, well-meaning to a fault. He is also a lifelong cop-show junkie, and when cops decide to set up shop in his house so that they can keep tabs on a career criminal (Robert Davi) who recently moved next door, he is in paradise. Real cops in his living room? His fantasy world suddenly manifested into the real world. And Norman can’t help himself but hover beside them, desperate to play sidekick. But all he manages to do is drive them nuts. Surely, the audience isn’t far behind.

Then the movie makes its worst mistake: it goes soft. Norman finds cause to reflect on his worth as a father, and decides that he’s been lousy. He mopes, while gazing at his kids with sitcom sorrow. Even if the movie’s comedy worked—and it doesn’t—these syrupy pauses surely would have strangled it.

This is a movie that should have been at least somewhat agreeable. Chase can play this role in his sleep, and maybe he did. Palance can glower forever, but here he’s a statue in motion. The result is a comedy with no pulse. An odd-couple premise too timid to be funny and too cloying to be sharp.

Serial killers became something like box-office mascots in the 1990s, and Copycat was among its smarter souvenirs. It’s slick on the surface and quick enough that you don’t stop long enough to wonder what made audiences so eager to see corpses posed like museum exhibits. Sigourney Weaver stars as Dr. Helen Hudson, a criminologist who studies killers like an entomologist studies insects—by their pincers and their movements. One such killer comes after her (a sweaty and feral Harry Connick Jr.), and she barely escapes with her life.

From that point onward, she holes herself up in her San Francisco apartment that’s more terrarium than home—glass walls, windows locked, doors bolted tight. It’s where she can watch the world without having to touch it. But murder, it would seem, has a way of coming to her. There is a killer loose in the city, and he is clearly trying to get Dr. Hudson’s attention. His calling card is that he doesn’t have one of his own. One by one, he stages his murder scenes from famous serial killers—Bundy, Son of Sam, Dahmer. Like grotesque cover versions of America’s ugliest chart-toppers.

Detectives M.J. Monahan (Holly Hunter, who plays her role sharp as wire) and Reuben Goetz (Dermot Mulroney, who is like a squint with a hangdog charm) pull Hudson out of her cocoon. The movie doesn’t spend much time brooding—it prefers to be slick, efficient and a little bit detached. Motives get sketched, morality is acknowledged and then it’s dropped to make way for the next scene. Perhaps something like the clean, pulpy link between the clinical dread of Silence of the Lambs and the baroque brutality of Seven.

Corpse Bride is no retread of The Nightmare Before Christmas, as tempting as it might be to compare the films. It might share Tim Burton as the force behind it, and it might also be stop-motion animated and share a similar visual style, but Corpse Bride is a gentler, moodier film. Call it more lullaby and elegy than holiday bombast. It’s not nearly as good as The Nightmare Before Christmas, but in its own small, enchanting way, it’s its own unique vision.

Johnny Depp voices Victor Van Dort, a nervous wreck in a cravat, a man who behaves as though he’s spent half his life apologizing just for existing. His arranged marriage to the quiet, melancholy Victoria (Emily Watson) is imminent, but he botches the vows at the wedding rehearsal. He flees to the woods to practice and slides a ring onto what he thinks is a tree root, believing that to be a suitable stand-in for his fiancée’s hand. And lucky for him, the words finally come out right. But unlucky for him, that root wasn’t a root at all. It was the mangled hand of a corpse. And she accepts his wedding vows—to her.

Her name is Emily (Helena Bonham Carter) who rises from the dirt to meet her new husband in the eyes, delighted to be claimed. But before Victor can stammer out a correction, she’s already dragged him down to the land of the dead. A place that’s quite different from the morose people and washed-out grays of the world that he’s used to upstairs. Down there, everything bursts alive: neon blues, ghostly greens, skeletons doing shimmies in what can only be described as a jazz-soaked carnival. There is no pain. Sure, people’s limbs might fly off occasionally, but that’s nothing you wouldn’t be able to reattach later. The closest thing you’ll find to anguish is the mental kind. The verbal lashings you might have to endure from a Peter Lorre–soundalike maggot living in your eye socket, whispering dubious advice at you like a twisted Jiminy Cricket. Even your pets might return to you, even if they’re more bones than fur.

While Corpse Bride might lack the sweep and sheer invention of Burton’s earlier work, it casts its own quiet spell. The stop-motion is warm and fluid (monochrome palette or not), and Danny Elfman’s songs—part cabaret numbers, part mournful ballads—slip easily between melancholy and mischief. This film is spectral and quite morbid but also sweet in its own ghoulish way.