Tim... my man... what the hell happened?
If we hone in on the first decade or so of his career, Tim Burton is one of my all-time favourite filmmakers. Beetlejuice, Batman, and Batman Returns are all locks for my top 100, and Ed Wood has an outside chance of qualifying as well. And yet, I don't think I've loved - or even strongly liked - anything he's made this century.
For a long time, I thought his increasing reliance on CGI and Johnny Depp were largely to blame, but it clearly runs deeper than that, considering neither are present here and I still greatly disliked the movie. It's more like Burton has simply lost interest in bringing any kind of creativity or passion or originality to his work (which is an observation that would've sounded downright absurd in the '90s), hence why most of his recent output feels so lazy and half-assed.
Big Eyes is another in that increasingly long line. It's got the usual latter-day Burton flaws of uninteresting characters, cliched dialogue, and weak performances, and then chucks on the kind of lie-based conflict that I can't imagine anyone finding remotely fun to watch. And the result is a bland, tedious, uninspired mess. Frankly, if not for the fact that it looks a million times better than Alice in Wonderland, I'd call it possibly the weakest film of the man's career.
Grade: C-
P.S. Christoph Waltz is pretty terrible in this, but I'll concede that his courtroom antics are quite funny. Dude might've had a better non-Tarantino Hollywood career if he took on more roles that played to his comedic strengths.