Blood, lots of blood, and some powerful performances

Rating: 10/10 (1 March 2008)

From the start to the end, you're left in no doubt that it's a Tim Burton film. All of his dark, macabre, eccentric signatures are right in place in the film, unmistakable, subtle and in your face in the same time.
London is dreary and hopeless, a god forsaken city, inhabited by vermin, as Sweeney so menacingly tells us. Who is Sweeney? Well, he was a barber with a different (more normal) name, with a pretty wife and a pretty child, who is packed off to Australia on false charges, because judge (Turpin) has eyes on Sweeney's wife. Until he's found by a young sailor (Anthony) 15 years later. When he moves back to his house/shop in Fleet Street, he finds the landlady (Mrs. Lovett, who's as much of a loony as Sweeney) baking the worst meat-pies in London, who tells him about the fate of his family. The wife raped by the judge, later gulps down arsenic, and the child adopted by the same judge who is the root of all of Sweeney's misery. Thus he goes mad with rage. After that follows a series of events which is best left covered up. I'll divulge only the following : the sailor who saved Sweeney falls in love with his daughter (I feeeeeeeeel youuuuu, Johannaaaaa!!), and the judge also wants to make her his wife. Oh and the chair, though I guess most promos have already shown it (again and again), sinister, very very sinister.
Johnny Depp just becomes more immense with every film, every performance. There's not much more to say really. One of the finest of his generation. Helena Bonham-Carter is brilliant as well. In fact, I can't think of anyone else to play Mrs, Lovett, even more so than Depp/Sweeney, she's so perfect. You fall in love and are repulsed by her in equal measure. BRILLIANT. Alan Rickman is suitably evil, Timothy Spall as slimy as he has ever been. Sacha Baron Cohen, as Signor Pirelli, a rival barber, who in a way starts 'it', is madcap as always (very good actor nonetheless). The sailor and the daughter don't have much to do, but do it well anyways. Toby, the boy employed by Pirelli from a work-house, and later Mrs. Lovett is surprisingly good as well. Surprisingly because you don't expect a child to be an important character in a movie like this, and it finally turns out he is.
The music's quite good. The singing's quite decent, the situations almost perfect.
Go to the theaters to see a film which is quite exquisitely, breathtakingly, brilliantly beautiful. I mean, a musical about serial killing. You'd be stupid not to see it. However if you're queasy in the sight of blood, stay faaaaaar away. This is one of the bloodiest, most violent films I've ever seen.