Seriously, how do you make Sweeney Todd and leave out "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd"?

Rating: 4/10 (13 October 2010)

If there's one thing that this movie proves beyond any doubt it is this â€“ you can't make a musical with people who can't really sing.
Adapted from Stephen Sondheim's classic stage production, this film tells the story of Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp). A barber in London with a beautiful wife and baby girl, Barker is arrested on a trumped up charge and thrown out of the country by the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman). Years later, he returns home to be told his wife is dead and his daughter has been raised as Turpin's ward. Consumed with revenge, Barker renames himself Sweeney Todd and plots the judge's murder. When his initial attempt on the judge's life fails, Todd launches into a spree of killings in his Fleet Street barber shop with the bodies of his victims becoming the daily food source for the meat pie shop of his downstairs neighbor, accomplice and admirer Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter). Turpin intends to marry Todd's daughter, but Johanna (Jayne Wisener) falls in love with a young sailor, Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower). Anthony conspires with Todd to free Johanna, but Todd wants to use them both to lure the judge back into his clutches.
The first and most important thing to say about this movie is that most of the actors in it can't really sing. They're not horrible, like drunk secretaries during karaoke night at the local bar or those freaks who show up at American Idol auditions, but they don't have anything like the pipes you need for this sort of music. Their voices are thin and cramped and shallow. Take Johnny Depp for example. He has his own rock band and listening to him in this film, you can easily imagine him being able to pull off your typical rock song. But musical theater, especially when it's the quality of Sweeney Todd, is a whole 'nother level and requires a great deal more talent and skill. Going back to American Idol, hearing Depp and Carter try and warble their way through some of Sweeney's excellent tunes is like hearing those lesser contestants on Idol try and fake their way through styles of music they're unfamiliar with and don't particularly like. In the whole cast, only Ed Sanders and Jamie Campbell Bower show off legitimate musical theater chops.
This film also commits one of the biggest and stupidest crimes in the history of big screen musical adaptations. It omits The Ballad of Sweeney Todd from the movie. It's simply one of the best songs in the whole show, and leaving it out is like doing Annie and leaving out "Tomorrow".
Visually, this may be the least interesting film Tim Burton has ever done. He gives London and its citizens a cartoonishly Gothic look, but the camera work and the way he shoots the songs, especially, are very pedestrian for a Burton movie. T here are only two or three instances in the whole film, such as when the bodies of Sweeney's victims thud against the stone floor of Mrs. Lovett's baking room, that show Burton's unique vision at all. It's almost as though he was unsure how to shoot the musical scenes and a sort of directorial paralysis spread throughout the entire film. The most Burtony section of the movie is a day dream sequence while Mrs. Lovett sings "By the sea", but the playful styling of that only emphasizes how ordinary everything else is.
In fairness to Burton, though, adapting Sweeney Todd to the silver screen is a big challenge. It's much more operatic than other musicals, with the characters actually singing the story for the most part in place of dialog. The songs are so important to the story and so intricate, I think they work better coming out of the mouth of someone standing on a stage instead of competing with all the visual imagery blaring at you from the screen.
Years ago, I saw a televised production of Sweeney Todd on Iowa Public Television starring Angela Lansbury and George Hearn. You might have to use the Google and go look for it on the Youtube or the eBay, but that fabulous production far outstrips this weak 2007 effort.