Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Sweeney Todd are all Tim Burton movies starring Johnny Depp. Lisa Frankenstein is Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin Williams, and Diablo Cody (Juno)  trying to do a coming-of-age story the way these two would do one. The problem is they fall very short of the dark lofty nature that Burton and Depp have delved into for so many years before. They think their doing something strange and weird like that iconic duo would do but their not. 

Lisa (Kathryn Newton, Antman Quantumania) is the daughter of a man Dale (Joe Chrest)  who remarries another woman after her mother has passed away. She’s been taken in by her stepmother Janet (Carla Gugino)  but she hasn’t adjusted very well to her new life. Her stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano) and her get along pretty well. With the latter looking out for the awkward weird one. They go to a party together and the awkward nature of Lisa is in full force. She’s just a laughing stock from the rest of the kids at the party she was at. 

Even though there is a lot of teen angst in this story it also has a supernatural element to it. While at the party there was a freak storm going on and a ball of lightning struck a familiar location, Lisa. A graveyard in which she likes to visit in her free time. While at the graveyard she likes to pretend that she’s in love with a man who seems interesting to her. Inapplicable, the course of the man she visits comes to life and they become friends with each other.  This is the Burton/Depp homage.

Frankenstein is in the title but it’s just a strange way to retell this classic Mary Shelley tale. I was always fond of the James Whale films myself but Frankenstein has been done very well by Mel Brooks in Young Frankenstein and by Kenneth Branagh in his version with Robert DNiro as the monster.  This version just takes this premise too far off to left field for my liking. The coming-of-age stuff was just not that good and it completely took me out of the film. 

Newton was good in Freaky the horror remake of Freaky Friday where a mother and daughter switch places, but in the case of Freaky the cheerleader switches places with a serial killer played by Vince Vaughn. She even made the older Cassie Lang bearable in Antman Quantuania. She’s just not that interesting of a character in this film. She’s just too weird for my liking and she doesn’t have any redeemable qualities I’m interested in. The relationship between her and the corpse wasn’t that fun off development either. 

The anesthetic of the movie once again is paying homage to many Burton/Depp films. The Dark color palette with splashes of lime green or hot pink fit right in with many of that duo’s films. This is exactly what they’d do if they were making this movie. It’s a cookie-cutter version of something they probably would have made in their earlier days. I just wished this had been more original and taken the Frankenstein premise in a better direction and didn’t feel like a copy of what that pair would have probably done.

Cole Sprouse )Five Feet Apart) plays the creature and he is as Good as you’d expect in a role like this, wooden. He does bring some humor to the monster which was a surprise. There is an element of mystery to him and the funny aspect of a dead man coming back to life in the 90s brought some levity to the performance by Sprouse. It just wasn’t good enough for me to recommend this movie though.

Lisa, Frankenstein doesn’t do anything out of the normal with the Frankenstein premise except throw in a coming-of-age subplot. That wasn’t very interesting. It was quite frankly annoying.  The whole vibe of the movie was like a Tim Burton/Johnny Depp collaboration that went wrong. Newton and Soberano do the best they can to make this an entertaining film but even then they can’t save it. The color palette and 80s-like production design are just wasted in a boring coming-of-age tom-com masquerading as a genre film.

2 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen