Burton brings Sweeney Todd back

Tim Burton brings Stephen Sondheim's Tony Award-winning musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street to life on the big screen.

This musical is based on the 18th century legend of Sweeney Todd, and specifically upon the 1973 play by Christopher Bond. Fully embossing the film with his signature, Burton strongly delivers this ghoulishly dark tale of a lower-class London barber whose hunger for revenge against a corrupt judge gives birth to an astounding murderer.

As usual, Johnny Depp is utterly convincing. His Sweeney, formally Benjamin Barker, having escaped false imprisonment in Australia after 15 years is ruled by reprisal upon his return to London. Handed over his razors by his disheveled long-ago landlady, Mrs. Lovett (Bonham Carter), who has devotedly guarded them all these years, he grasps a blade with his firm right hand, and bellows, “At last, my arm is complete again.”


His bloodthirsty rage centers on Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), a foul sexual predator who had Benjamin arrested by henchman Beadle Bamford (a sycophantic Timothy Spall) so that he could steal Benjamin's wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) and baby daughter (Jayne Wisener).

Soon after his escape Sweeney discovers that his wife killed herself and Turpin, who took the baby as his protégé, hungers after the now grown woman. Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower), a young sailor who rescued Sweeney at sea, is also romantically inclined toward Johanna (Jayne Wisener). Hence; a triangle of fixated characters materializes.

Depp plays Sweeney as a man so centered on death and revenge he has lost all touch with life. Mrs. Lovett is herself obsessed with Sweeney and imagines an impossible ‘fairy tale life of bliss' with him. Whilst the judge, hungering after young women, is short of any principles other than those of selfishness. Rickman beautifully plays this part, using all his skills and no doubt intelligence to wheedle an individual out of this fiend.

Music has always played a pivotal role in Burton's films, notably Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Corpse Bride. However, without any stage experience, Burton approaches this fantastical Broadway musical with both accuracy and suppleness, delivering a picture that undoubtedly serves the intentions of the original piece. It sounds delicious and you are indisputably in for a unique treat.

Producers Richard Zanuck, Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald and Sondheim, also merit praise for guaranteeing that everyone involved on the film was the right person for the job.