Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, 3 stars
Mar 15th, 2008 by lavonardo
Watched Tim Burton’s take of Stephen Sondheim’s musical. Somehow, even though I liked the movie, I ended up disappointed.
The story is a penny dreadful from mid 19th century, and the simple singleminded tale of vengeance is not really at fault here. Nope, the plot flows as expected, and accompanied by liters of blood as the eponymous barber takes his revenge on London.
A London, whose dreary ugliness could have been exploited a lot more. The scenery shows how the rapidly industrializing Britain was not a pretty place at all, but spends far too much time inside Sweeney’s shop and avoids outside shots.
The leading couple, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter play their parts well, including the singing bits. Sadly, the songs are not really that good - this is not a take on the musical that remains imprinted into memory. There’s lots of songs, and bits of song, but all in all they feel glued on, since a lot of the action happens in spoken format. The fully musical form (as put out with Juice Leskinen’s libretto) in the finnish national opera a decade back seemed a lot more well-produced package.
The duo of Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall, united again after the latest Potter franchises, have not traded in their key characteristics. Overbearing pomposity is still Rickman’s cornerstone, while Spall’s ingratiating sniveler has acquired teeth (or actually a telescoping stick) in the meantime. However, by far the most prominent supporting actor is Sacha Baron Cohen - as an italian rival barber of Sweeney Todd’s his screentime could easily have been extended with no ill effects.
Another starring element in the film is blood in Peckinpahian quantities - this is probably the splatteriest mainstream movie in years. Nonetheless the 18-rating given to the movie in Finland is overkill, mere blood and a slice of implied cannibalism never hurt anybody. Sweeney Todd was the first ever movie where a couple of kids asked me to buy tickets for them (and probably act as a surrogate guardian when enterin the theatre) - fortunately the showtime was almost upon us, and managed to use the extensive queue as an excuse to weasel myself out of this odd duty.
