Doesn't "cut it" for me

Rating: 6/10 (26 January 2008)

I'm not a big fan of musicals unless the music isn't typically that of a musical if you get me - for example The Blues Brothers, O Brother Where Art Thou and Chicago are amongst my favourites in the genre.
What do I not like about this movie - I felt that it was poorly paced, spent too long on certain plot points that could have been covered more efficiently and the character setup was a bit slow. The music I found wasn't particularly memorable and conflicted with the dark tone of the story and characters too much to pull me into the universe. I did notice that some themes were reprised at different points to make an emotional and musical mark, which is good musical practice, but a day after having seen it I can't recite a single bar from it.
What does it have going for it then? Well it looks fantastic, very grim and dirty. Performances from the leads - Bonham Carter, Depp, Spall, Rickman, Baron Cohen - were good and committed. It was also a good choice to have the actors do their own singing, to make it a bit more believable. The killing scenes were disturbing, which is a good thing as that is what you'd be looking for in this kind of deal, and sometimes they were dealt with a bit of black humour, also a good thing. I thought that the final frames, even though they were grisly, were beautiful and poignant.
All in all a mixed bag for newbies. If you like musicals, worth a watch. If you're already a fan of the musical, worth a watch. If you're not fussed on musicals, there's probably still something in it to make it worth going to see.