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Review: Sweeney Todd

A film combining the talents of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp has a certain expectation attached to it, and this is no exception. It's one of the most anticipated films of the year, and as a particularly large fan of the aforementioned chaps, I was excited. Review: Sweeney Todd

The feeling I left the cinema with however, was similar to the one I had following my first viewing of The Phantom Menace. Immense disappointment. Don’t get me wrong, Sweeney Todd is well directed, well acted and well sung, and it has an absolutely fantastic musical score, but for me it lacked any sort of depth whatsoever.

Sweeney Todd

All the elements of the best Tim Burton films are all here, beautiful costume and set design, fantastic lighting and great photography. Other common elements, such as weird, interesting characters and a twisting, original plot however, are sparse at best. Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs Lovett and Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli, a rival barber, are decent sub-characters but Depp as Todd lacks anything particularly special.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Some of my favourite films are Burton-Depp collaborations, so maybe my expectations are super high, but maybe I wanted Todd to be a little more than just melancholy. Maybe a twisted sense of humour, some maniacal rage or something, I dunno.

I could go on, there’s a lot of detail that was missing, which is very uncharacteristic of Burton; maybe he was concentrating too much on the songs and the musical-ness of it, but then these went on too long and weren’t varied enough. All in all it’s definitely worth a watch, but don’t go in expecting something new, or indeed anything as entertaining as anything from Burton’s back catalogue. 

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About this entry

  • Posted on: 27/01/08
  • Posted in: Film

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