Big, bold and bloody but not that brilliant.

Rating: 6/10 (3 November 2008)

It's not that Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a bad film as much as it is a bad Tim Burton film. The film looks good visually and is very ominous in its cinematography and use of a grotty and bleak location but most of this is what we come to expect from Burton and is nothing more than a sheen on a surface when broken down and thought about. Most of Burton's films that do not contain a certain amount of substance really rely on the visual; Sleepy Hollow and Mars Attacks! are two good examples with Batman, Batman Returns and Ed Wood being films that looked pretty ordinary but actually felt as if they were about something; about people and predicaments and coming through in the end. Sweeney Todd is one of the former; iffy, visually attractive efforts but 'not much else going on' films.
A few years prior to Sweeney Todd, Joel Schumacher made The Phantom of the Opera, another musical adaptation for the silver screen. There are connections between the two. Both are films about individuals whom have suffered in the past and have been scarred so badly, either physically or psychologically, they take it upon themselves to inhabit a certain 'space' in which they are able to remain, cut off from the outside world as they reflect their social misfit status. What's interesting about The Phantom and Sweeney Todd is their dwelling. Both the opera house and the barber shop offer members of the public a certain 'service'. At the time of The Phantom of the Opera, the opera house (along with the theatre) was very much a means of entertainment for a night out; a place that has since been associated with visitors whom are sophisticated or cultured.
A barbers shop on the other hand can be seen as a place in which the tenants go in order to save themselves a job. There is something nonchalant about a man going to a barbers to have someone else shave him; a certain amount of risk about entrusting another individual with something as potentially dangerous as a razor so close to one's face. In this sense, the spaces Todd and The Phantom inhabit are somewhat associated with the upper class or the nonchalant and are spaces the respected anti-heroes turn into places of horror and terror with their anger and hatred born out of their own social role as a misfit. I liked The Phantom of the Opera slightly more; it felt more heartfelt and revolved around a romance more so than it did a tale of revenge as seen in Sweeney Todd.
So if the unique selling point here is that Sweeney Todd is a revenge film, incorporating the genre of the musical and throwing in lashings of gore at the same time, does it work? The short answer is 'not really'. This hybridity of the musical, a casual and usually uplifting genre that falls into the non-realist sense combined with the gritty, realist revenge arc complete with lots of gore does not work here. The film sees Sweeney arrive back in London following years away after a conviction he was innocent of in the first place. This charge was related to the 'crime' of being in love with someone that someone else of a greater power was also in love with. That man is Judge Turpin (Rickman), the slimy Brit-cast baddie who has an equally slimy sidekick in Beadle, Timothy Spall doing what he did in the recent Harry Potter films to reasonably good effect once again, so we've seen it before.
Johnny Depp's Sweeney Todd is a follow on from his 'funny' mumbling character Captain Jack Sparrow but less Keith Richards and more Charlie Manson. Todd is a changed man after his stint away from England for punishment of being with this other woman but he's changed for the worse and it's not long before he gets the blood lust that will drive him to his inevitable show down with enemy Judge Turpin. The film is very basic in its idea and set up and a lot of it is music and songs but while there's nothing wrong with that, it's the little things that niggle. The shaving show down with Pirelli (Baron-Cohen), who is a negative Italian stereotype in himself, acts as an introduction to Todd's barber skills and no more. There is also a particularly unpleasant 'joke' involving his child assistant and his constantly cut fingers.
But Sweeney Todd is the sort of film that places young children in a position for the sake of laughs when one child is on the floor drunk later on and it just feels out of place. Amongst all the stereotypes and the using of Brits as the villains is an American playing Todd, complete with a white streak in his hair amongst a lot of black in a desperate attempt to visually show us there might be some good or 'light' in him amongst all the 'evil'. The sub narrative of Anthony (Campbell Bower) loving and chasing Johanna (Wisener) is daft and degrading, Johanna being relegated to the role of 'damsel in distress/locked in a tower' as her hero/lover stands, sings and watches her from below. Later, she is moved to an asylum of all places and that's the end of that mini-story.
Additionaly, why does Burton shoot his wife Bonham-Carter in an objective fashion as she pours out of a corset? Similarly to Len Wiseman and the Underworld films, we're not watching the film to see your wife presented in a provocative fashion. If people being killed and served as pies as later on two potential kid killers roam the sewers searching for a lost boy sounds like fun then you might enjoy Sweeney Todd but it is a rather daft and lifeless film directed by a man that you expect better from.