still makes the "cut", even after twelve years

Rating: 8/10 (24 August 2008)

Tim Burton has taken everything to the extreme with his adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street". I saw the stage production back in 1996 when it came to Portland. Obviously, the movie version had to remove a few things, but they still did a really good job with it.
Johnny Depp is just great as Sweeney Todd/Benjamin Barker: with ghostly white makeup and jet black hair - except for a white streak - he looks like something out of a 1930s horror flick (many of which had the same setting as this movie). Equally menacing is Helena Bonham Carter as his partner-in-crime, pie maker Mrs. Lovett: looking almost exactly like her role as Bellatrix LaStrange in the Harry Potter movies, she's the perfect cross between scary and sexy. Alan Rickman -who seems to be channeling his role as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies - turns Judge Turpin into one nasty dude: it's hard not to wish that corrupt thug ill. Sacha Baron Cohen...well, although it's hard to imagine him as anyone other than Borat, he plays Adolfo Pirelli to a tee. Timothy Spall, as Turpin's assistant Beadle Bamford, creates the same kind of weaselly character that he played in the Harry Potter movies and "Enchanted"; you gotta admire this character!
Yet another character - so to speak - is the setting. We see London as an ugly, dark, nearly pestilent place. All in all, this combination creates a very fine film. Not Burton's best in my opinion (I consider "Ed Wood" his best), but a true accomplishment. And remember: desperate times require desperate measures.