"I can guarantee the closest shave you'll ever know."

Rating: 7/10 (15 February 2008)

Only director Tim Burton could possibly contemplate producing a Gothic musical about a murderous, serial-killing barber. 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)' is one of the bloodiest movies that you'll see all year, but there's something about the juxtaposition of murder and music that makes his film utterly irresistible. The screenplay was adapted from Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical of the same name, which was based on the already-prevalent Sweeney Todd legend from the nineteenth century. Johnny Depp plays Benjamin Barker, a happy family man who is falsely arrested and deported to a penal colony in Australia after the lustful Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) covets his beautiful wife (Laura Michelle Kelly). After an arduous fifteen years, Barker  now named Sweeney Todd  escapes from imprisonment and returns to the dark, sinister streets of London, where he learns that his wife committed suicide and that the malevolent Turpin has claimed their daughter (Jayne Wisener) as his own. As he strikes up a peculiar romantic relationship with Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), the owner of a meat pie store in the shop below him, Sweeney begins to plot a gloriously bloody vengeance.
The vast proportion of A-list actors, however Oscar-worthy their talents might be, fail miserably when asked to sing a single line, and so it comes as a surprise that the entire cast of 'Sweeney Todd' does an outstanding job. More than three-quarters of the screenplay is sung rather than spoken, and Depp and Bonham Carter, in particular, reveal themselves to have considerable musical talent {the singing voices you hear are all those of the actors you can see on screen}. Johnny Depp, with a prominent white streak through his stylish black hair, is superbly brooding as the titular character, and his uncontrolled rage during the sequences of bloody throat-slitting is both invigorating and rather terrifying. Also delivering excellent performances are the menacing Alan Rickman, a dangerous and unforgiving representation of corrupt power, the indispensable Timothy Spall, singularly grotesque and unforgettable, and Sacha Baron Cohen, a hilariously supercilious "Italian" barber of some repute. Of the younger actors, Ed Sanders is the most impressive by far, threatening the steal the limelight on more than a few occasions.
Tim Burton's primary trademark as a director is his incredible visual style. 'Sweeney Todd,' set in the dimly-lit streets of a crumbling and uninviting London, successfully evokes the style of David Lean's 'Oliver Twist (1948),' and other Charles Dickens cinematic adaptations. Sweeney's bloodshed is completely uninhibited, and, in a similarly-stylised move to Quentin Tarantino's 'Kill Bill (2003-2004),' graphic spurts of intensely-red blood from the jugular vein are a common occurrence. The violence is extremely cartoonish rather than realistic, and Burton was adamant that such explicit acts of brutality must be included in the film's final product: "Everything is so internal with Sweeney that {the blood} is like his emotional release. It's more about catharsis than it is a literal thing." The film's all-important soundtrack was sampled from Stephen Sondheim's stage version of the story {one of the few occasions in which Burton didn't employ the services of Danny Elfman}, and it is suitably thrilling and epic. As 'Sweeney Todd' arrived at its devastating tragic conclusion and the credits began to roll, my two friends alongside me  both possessing a staunch aversion towards musicals  announced their greatest enthusiasm for the film. If there's any loftier praise than that, then I really can't think what it is.