A Musical Splatter Flick

Rating: 5/10 (29 September 2009)

Tim Burton says he loves musicals, his partner, Helena Bonham Carter says he does not like musicals. Whatever the truth may be the results of his filming of 'Sweeney Todd' are ambivalent.
It looks like a Burton film, the sets are great (studio bond) and the costumes and makeup out of his top drawer. The film is similar to 'Sleepy Hollow' in that the colors are muted, mostly sepia, browns, gray and black with emphasis placed on the bright red blood (lots of it) and yellow, for the charlatan's elixir of urine at the street fair. Sasha Baron Cohen shines as this character and is the most entertaining of all the cast, and he can sing!
Johnny Depp sings well too, though obviously he's not all that comfortable with it, this being his first filmed singing role. Helena Bonham Carter is also good, and she seems better at acting and singing at the same time than Depp. But as they are both duffers at musicals they are well-matched together and make a compelling couple in their dark machinations.
The supporting cast is good if only amounting to stock character acting. It was type casting to have Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin. He gives his trademark mush mouthed performance and sings okay. Timothy Spall is rather wasted as Turpin's brutal flunky but he does what he can. The star is Edward Sanders as Toby, the young lad who is taken on by Mrs Lovett as her shop assistant and in the end dispatches Sweeney Todd. The kid can sing and act with beguiling aplomb.
The minor love interest is totally dull, the two young actors hardly having a chance to create any chemistry between them. Joanna, Todd's long lost daughter, is an empty vessel, there simply for the plot, and the actress can't sing for beans.
I don't understand the great popularity of this Broadway show. Sondheim's lyrics are the strongest points, but the music is largely unmemorable, containing not a single memorable tune. It's the lyrics that stick in the mind. 'Sweeney Todd' is nowhere near Sondheim's greatest musical (to my way of thinking) 'A Little Night Music'.
The comedy is almost non-existent, and I don't see what could possibly be funny about this gruesome tale in the first place. I haven't seen the musical play which may be funny, I don't know. This film is not. It's gory, in Burton's usual manner. The blood looks more realistic than it did in, say, 'Sleepy Hollow' and there are copious quantities of it, the cumulative effect of which is indeed rather sickening. Something about razors, I suppose, that makes it very squirmy watching.
I liked Bonham Carter's Mrs Lovett. She's on the young side, compared with Angela Lansbury, and is beautiful in a decayed way, and she does add some comedy at moments with her wide range of subtle facial expressions. I enjoyed her very much. Depp is not so satisfying, though good. He looks the part and expresses the anger and murderous intent very clearly, but he's more down the lines of a dark Jack the Ripper than the, supposedly, more buffo Todd.
Victorian London is evoked beautifully, too beautifully. The streets are clear of horse manure and other offal and it doesn't 'smell' visually as it should. Mary Poppins would have been quite at home in the pristine throngs of these London streets and byways. There is one glaring spacial mistake with Mrs Lovett's shop. Sweeney's trick chair upstairs is placed so that, in reality, it would dump his victims directly into Mrs Lovett's pie shop by the front door.
Ultimately, I can't see the point of this film, other than to get Sondheim's mediocre score on celluloid with big name stars, and for Burton to show off his best trademark features. The blood is gratuitously over-bearing and the plot line is very thin and the script is very weak.
If I watch it again it will be for Bonham Carter, Cohen and young Sanders displaying their talents under Tim Burton's meticulous direction.
I look forward now, more than ever, to Burton's upcoming 'Alice in Wonderland' to redeem him of this relative failure. 'Sweeney Todd' is Burton's least successful film and I hope he never sinks to this level again.
Lastly, I missed the music of Danny Elfman in a Burton feature. He and Tim Burton are as strongly associated with one another as were Bernard Hermann and Alfred Hitchcock.