Going against the grain

Rating: 4/10 (10 April 2008)

First of all I am not a big fan of musicals. I have seen several good ones and many, many bad ones. Where a bad play can induce laughter, a bad musical just induces nausea, anger and boredom. Unfortunately the latter two describe my feelings after watching Sweeney Todd. These feelings were probably accentuated by my dislike for almost anything written by Stephen Sondheim (West Side Story being the exception), Tim Burton's drab, dull, and lifeless direction and unfortunately not one of the actors has much in the way of a gifted voice (I'm sorry Helena, Alan and Johnny).
The story revolves around a gifted barber named Benjamin Barker (Depp) with a beautiful wife and child. The envious Judge Turpin (Rickman) covets Barker's wife and proceeds to frame him to get him out of the way. Barker's innocent wife is taken advantage of and his child becomes the ward of the lecherous Judge. Years pass and Barker returns to London after being released from incarceration. He is now Sweeney Todd and has returned to enact his revenge. He meets Mrs. Lovett (Carter) who becomes his villainous accomplice. If you didn't figure out the predictable plot, his victims become the stuff of the meat pie Mrs. Lovett sells (and yes Soylent Green is made of people too).
I have not seen or heard any of the original musical so I do not have anything to compare this movie to. I can only judge it based on its own merits, of which there are few. Tim Burton (who has a tendency for great visuals but not telling stories well) has created a dull, drab, dirty and lifeless London. You would think with the vast amount of bloodletting in this mostly gray movie, it would show up in vivid and cherry red. Instead it looks like dull paint. I have found Johnny Depp's presence in most movies to make any film better. It sadly fails here. The cast is pretty talented consisting of the aforementioned Depp, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, Timothy Spall and even Borat himself, Sacha Baron Cohen. None of them is particularly gifted vocally (this could also be a limitation of the musical itself, but I doubt it). After seeing the ultimate in revenge movies (Chan-wook Park's trilogy), this movie turns very predictable. Other reviewers talk about the dark comedy aspect of the movie, of which I saw little. Perhaps the musical had some, but it has been completely stripped away by Burton, much like the visual representation of London.
The last 20 minutes of the movie is the best of the approximately 2 hour runtime, most likely because no one is singing. I would have liked to have seen a version of this movie without the music. An adaption of a musical without the music, now that might have been interesting. That along with the usually talented cast is the sole reason this movie got a rating above 2 in the first place. If you like to be bored, disappointed and annoyed then this movie is perfect for you. I do believe that a film aspires to be the vision of a collaborative effort, with the director at the helm. The goal is to make you see something or feel something they want, not what you want. It is to make you feel something other than what you would be comfortable with. I seriously doubt Tim's vision was to bore, disappoint and annoy. If you are curious about Sweeney Todd skip the movie and go straight for the musical.