Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (**1/2)

Tim Burton was the right director for this adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler musical, itself adapted from an earlier play by Christopher Bond, who based his story on a long-told urban legend. The legend concerned a murderous barber in league with a purveyor of meat pies. The title character is played by Johnny Depp, who has already played an assortment of oddballs for Burton, including Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Willy Wonka. Burton is one of the film world’s most distinctive visual stylists, and the success of his movies tends to rest on what you think of the stories he adapts. When they’re thin, you get a movie as one-dimensional as Mars Attacks! With better material, Burton’s visual sense has greatly enhanced movies such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Big Fish. Almost all of the director’s films have had a fantasy element, and this visually recalls another retelling of a legend, Sleepy Hollow. With a filter casting a bluish pall over most scenes, Burton brings out the grime and gruesomeness of industrial-age London. Only a lovely looking fantasy sequence, and the copious outpouring of blood, put a little color into the picture. If you fancy the story, and the song-speech that propels much of the plot, and you’ll probably like the movie. I’m not crazy about those things, and didn’t like it. I did appreciate the casting of Helena Bonham Carter as Todd’s partner in crime and Alan Rickman as his nemesis.

IMDB link

reviewed 1/09/08