For several years this movie has been on my gotta-see-sometime-list. I finally did see it. What I didn’t know was that there’s a Broadway musical from 1979 with the same name. Thus, I was in for a lot of singing. Like in The Nightmare Before Christmas – but worse. Cause there’s actually just one thing I dislike about this Tim Burton movie – and that is all the fucking singing.

If the whole thing would’ve been made like a regular movie instead without the actors ranting around singing, I would endorse it fully. Anyways. Sweeney Todd. The plot:

Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp), a skilled barber, is falsely charged and sentenced to a life of hard labor in Australia by the corrupt Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who lusts after Barker’s wife Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly). Now under the assumed name “Sweeney Todd”, Barker returns to London with sailor Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower). At his old Fleet Street lodgings above Mrs. Nellie Lovett’s (Helena Bonham Carter) pie shop, he discovers that Lucy, having been raped by Turpin, has poisoned herself, and his teenage daughter Johanna (Jayne Wisener) is now Turpin’s ward, and like her mother before her, is the object of his unwanted affections. Todd vows revenge, reopening his barber shop in the upstairs flat. And boy does the blood flow.

As I’ve said in previous reviews I’m really fascinated by that typical Burton gothic esthetics – and you get plenty of that in this movie too (as you may already tell from the poster).

Even though all the singing and everything is annoying in the start, you get used to it and don’t mind it as much as the movie proceeds. Some people would say that the musical part is the charm of the whole thing. Those people don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Anyways, good story of revenge and how it isn’t always sweet. Johnny Depp and Sascha Baron Cohen (yes, he’s actually playing a major part in the first half of the movie) perform excellent as always.

If you feel that you can take a little (well, maybe not so little) singing for seeing a lot of people get their throats slit – then you’re in for a really good movie.