A self-infatuated morass...

Rating: 4/10 (17 July 2017)

Reflections in a razor. After being falsely imprisoned for 15 years, Benjamin Barker, London's most efficient barber, returns to his Fleet St. haunts under an alias to exact revenge on the villainous judge who allegedly drove Barker's wife to suicide and now has designs on their grown daughter. Long-overdue film-adaptation of the 1979 Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, itself derived from George Dibdin-Pitt's play, first filmed in 1928 and again with Tod Slaughter starring in 1936. This time, the material is served up as macabre, black comedy, with director Tim Burton giving the picture an icy-gray pallor--and not just on the actors' faces, but an overall chilly deadness which seems ingrained in the film itself. Glowering, mumbling Johnny Depp attempts a perpetual low-key in the lead--in fact, most of the performances are muted in general--but this works against the film's aim (one presumes) to be a darkly comic grotesquerie. Black-red blood is splashed and dashed about the screen quite stylishly, but the heart of the piece is never found. The hand-picked cast perform their songs more than adequately, yet they are unable to bring these characters to life. Production design and technical aspects first-rate, but exactly what audience was Burton hoping to capture? *1/2 from ****