Honestly an Awful Movie

Rating: Null/10 (8 January 2008)

I believe i may be a rarity, someone who didn't like Sweeny Todd, but the movie is in all, bad.
(NO SPOILERS YET) 1. Most of the actors are awful singers. This coupled with the music being very boring and uninteresting lead to large chunks of the movie being impossible to enjoy. (just a note, listen to Elton John, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, all British singers whose accents disappear when they sing, it just happens, but Depp and Carter force out bad cockney singing. The bad music got old really fast. I am not biased, I really liked Chicago, Cradle Will Rock and other musicals, but the music is bad and the singers worse.
2. The story is really, really dull. Leave it to Stephen Sondheim to make a mass murderer boring. Not to mention the daughter falling in love with the young man despite only seeing him that one time and not even talking to him. She wants to spend the rest of her life with some man she just met.
(SPOILERS) 3. The Judge became more sympathetic than Todd. Its impossible for a person to sympathize with a man who murders innocent people for his own gain. But its easier to sympathize with a man who tried to redeem himself for driving Mrs. Todd insane by caring for, educating and protecting her Daughter, only to have his heart broken. Watching Todd kill the Judge just seemed wrong. Todd became a murderer of innocent people, its like siding with Gacy or Dahmer. If they had made a movie following the descent of a man into madness for his lost love or becoming obsessed with something (in his case revenge), it may have been a good movie. But Sweeny Todd does not explore any of that, the changes are cartoonishly simple and they clear out all psychology or character development to make way for that horrid music.
(SPOILERS END HERE) Redeeming Qualities: Every Scene with Sacha Baron Cohen and to a lesser extent the kid.
In all, the movie was boring. Even the gore (which looked foolishly like red paint) was not enough to make the movie entertaining. The characters were empty, the story was lame and predictable, and that singing, oh god that singing.
Also on a final note, I see a lot of mention of "Darkly funny" or "Comic". I laughed once maybe twice. The movie wasn't funny... at all.