Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

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by Shadowmancer | Dec 08 2007

Johnny Depp and Tim Burton are kind of like Reese’s Cups. Two great tastes that go great together. Each of their previous outings have been phenomenal: Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Corpse Bride are all among my favorite films. Generally, if either of them does something, I’m there, but when they work together, I’m ecstatic.

So it should come as no surprise that I’ve been waiting for Sweeney Todd for a decade. Burton first signed on to help bring the Broadway musical to the screen over ten years ago, but the film languished in turnaround, and was almost made with Russell Crowe in the title role. Thankfully, it got back around to Tim Burton, and well, Johnny Depp was pretty much a given at that point.

If you aren’t familiar with the musical, the basic story is this: barber with lovely wife is falsely imprisoned for fifteen years so that the judge can move in on said lovely wife. Barber returns from his time in prison and starts killing people in an effort to avenge himself on the evil judge. Oh, and his downstairs neighbor cooks his victims into meat pies and feeds them to the rest of London. Quick bit of trivia: the actor who played Anthony in the original Broadway staging was Victor Garber, Sydney’s dad from Alias.

The movie is gorgeous. When they built the sets, Burton was specific about wanting “horror movie” London, rather than historical London. The sets reminded me so much of Hammer films that I expected Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing to wander in at any moment. The costumes are tattered and decadent, in a typical Burtonesque twist on Victorian fashion. And it’s bloody. Oh, so very bloody. The violence and gore is crazily over-the-top (again, a la Hammer films, but also reminiscent of Tarantino’s Kill Bill without getting us quite to the level of Fulci’s gross-out cinema). The blood and guts of the film actually slide beyond disgusting and back around to comical.

Yes, the film is violent, and morbid, and hilarious. Mrs. Lovett’s fantasy at the picnic is completely bent. The bright, saturated colors of the country side, or the beach, or the cottage setting, are all made even more ridiculous by the monotone appearance of both Todd and Mrs. Lovett herself. They look like cutouts from an Edward Gorey book pasted into travel agent brochures. The Joanna montage with Anthony and Sweeney Todd alternating is a great contrast of longing and insanity.

It is a musical, and many of the actors are unproven, but Johnny Depp does amazingly well, considering. Helena Bonham Carter is great in the role originated by Angela Lansbury, and Sacha Baron Cohen is sidesplitting as Perelli. The weakest singer of the bunch is Alan Rickman, but he’s still Alan Rickman, so we let it slide. Nobody was as bad as Gerard Butler in The Phantom of the Opera, so it works. (Don’t get me wrong, Butler was awesome in both 300 and Beowulf and Grendel, he just can’t pull off Michael Crawford.)

I loved this film. It’s warped, twisted, funny and heartbreaking at the same time. When you see it, keep an eye out for the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by Anthony Stewart Head, aka Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer after the shaving duel.

Rating: 9/10
Tags: review, movies, blood, tim burton, musical, johnny depp

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