![]() Jumbo, a pregnant Asian elephant, and is already counting the cash her irresistible baby will be bringing in. ![]() The enterprise’s feisty owner, Max Medici (DeVito), who has no actual brother, believes he has found an attraction to remedy the hard times he has purchased Mrs. Circus setting up its faded big top and surrounding camp for another struggling engagement. The town is a hive of activity, with the Medici Bros. The movie opens with a boisterous surge of Danny Elfman‘s score as a steam train in 1919 chugs from Sarasota, Florida, up across the Panhandle and continues on to Joplin, Missouri. Burton and Kruger certainly show affection for the 1941 film, including at least a nod to most of its more iconic moments and a hint of its handful of songs - even the trippy “Pink Elephants on Parade” - though wisely skipping the jive-talking crows. Part of the challenge was fleshing out widely known source material (the original was based on the novel by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl) that by today’s standards is positively anemic in plot terms its running time barely goes over the hour mark. The central failure to recognize those virtues lies also in Ehren Kruger’s cluttered screenplay. Up to then, the filmmaker’s overstuffed visual imagination and appetite for sinister gloom all but trample the enchantment of a tale that, at heart, is simple and whimsical. But this is another frustratingly uneven picture, with thin characters - human and animal - that fail to exert much of a hold, reclaiming the story only toward the end. The hopes of diehard Burton fans might have been stoked by the recruitment of Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito, totems of the director’s more consistent days. ![]() But perhaps what Disney had in mind for its live-action Dumbo was more in the strange-and-fantastical Burton realm, a circus fantasia viewed through a nightmare filter? Edward Scissorhands was probably the last Tim Burton film in which the sentimental core felt remotely personal, as opposed to the cloying manufactured charm of, say, Big Fish - though a case could be made that Frankenweenie was a more recent detour into someplace heartfelt. It was a big risk taking a film guaranteed to reduce multiple generations to puddles of childhood-memory tears and entrusting remake responsibilities to a director whose track record at summoning genuine emotion is patchy at best.
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