Get Ready for a Bloody Good Time

Rating: 10/10 (25 December 2007)

My wife and I saw this 12/21/2007 with a full audience. This movie involves highly-rated actors singing instead of highly-rate singers acting. As such, singing is fair-to-good, but the acting and drama is first rate. Dreamworks/Warner Bros. could not have picked a better director than Tim Burton, a quirky leader for a quirky musical.
The costumes and sets truly take you back to London as it was in 1785. My hats off to the art and set crew.
Johnny Depp is wonderful as the obsessed barber of Fleet Street bent on revenge. Helena Bonham Carter is crazy good as the pining-for-Todd Mrs. Lovett. Indeed, I was strongly reminded of this choice of actors as a kind of Pirates of the Caribbean meets Harry Potter, with their heavy use of eye shadow, and the use of Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin (Snape for H.P. fans) and Timothy Spall as Beadle (Wormtail for H.P. fans). Truly, an Oscar-winning team if I ever saw one.
However, this film, true to the nature of the musical, is dark and bloody. Tim Burton takes Stephen Sondheim's musical and up's the gore to the Nth degree. This is not for the squeamish.
I hope that when the DVD of this film is released, the production will have the good sense to offer a "sanitized" play track on the disc so that my family doesn't have to see the blood over and over again.