Good screen adaptation of the now classic Broadway musical

Rating: 7/10 (6 January 2008)

Returning from a long time at sea Sweeney Todd returns to London looking for the family that was taken from him. When he finds his wife dead and daughter the ward of the Judge that framed him he plots revenge with the aid of Mrs Lovett, his landlady and the owner of a shop that sells meat pies.
Tim Burton's adaption of the Stephen Sondheim Musical is a ghoulish tour de force. This is a largely sung story that has been given the grand treatment by Burton and his crew. Coming on the heels of a very stripped down version that recently played Broadway where the actors played all the instruments and the whole story seemed to be being performed by inmates in a single room asylum, this is a big huge production where we are in all of the streets and back alleys of London. This is a throw back in size and scale to the musicals of old. The wide scale opening up of the play works wonders so that when we close in to Sweeney's and Mrs Lovett's small rooms we feel how trapped they are by circumstance and poverty. As a technical achievement the film is a masterpiece and one of the best things that Tim Burton has put together.
The cast is a mixed bag. Everyone is good but some people are better than others, with Helena Bonham Carter probably the weakest vocally as Mrs Lovett. Her physical performance is quite good, but vocally she can be quite shrill.Johnnie Depp is wonderful as Todd, but its clear that as good an actor and singer he is he couldn't do this on stage (I know one should not compare stage and screen but with this show its hard not to). The one person who amazed me was Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli a rival to Todd. He is pretty much note perfect in his performance.
If I have any real qualms with the film its the source material. I am not a Sondheim fan. I do like this musical, owing no doubt to ts ghoulish nature, but I've never loved. There are simply things in the show that didn't work for me on stage so didn't work for me here either. Even though I'm not fully enraptured of the films source, the film is certainly worth seeing, Though be warned the film is VERY bloody. The reason the film is rated R is because of the blood that is spilled.
7 out of 10 for me and my reservations 8 out of 10 for everyone else