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I saw this last night and I thought it was good, but not brilliant. I enjoyed the comic aspects, especially Todd sitting sullenly at the beach in Mrs Lovett's fantasy song, and wished there could have been a few more to lift the gloomy melodrama.
The trouble with Sweeney Todd as a musical was that the songs are not sparklingly brilliant. The one when they come up with the idea about the pies (A Little Priest?) was good, but some of the more sentimental stuff was little more than filler.
The performances matched the content in being quite over the top, which is what you expect from Depp these days (who, incidentally has improved his cockney accent since From Hell), but in this he is joined by his co-stars. It has a nice Gothic atmosphere, but I thought the staging was a little bare - it would probably look great on stage, but for a complete film a little more was needed than an animated sweep of the city's rooftops to flesh out the setting.
I admired the attempt to allow us to sympathise with Todd a bit more by giving him a tragic romantic back story, so that we are at first pretty much on his side in his plan for revenge, but any sympathy was lost when he failed to help to rescue his daughter in favour of practising his throat slitting on unsuspecting customers. I can understand that his humanity has been lost to his thirst for revenge, but not while he still has a chance to rescue his daughter and redeem himself.
On a side note, concerning the behaviour of cinema audiences...
3.5/5
The trouble with Sweeney Todd as a musical was that the songs are not sparklingly brilliant. The one when they come up with the idea about the pies (A Little Priest?) was good, but some of the more sentimental stuff was little more than filler.
The performances matched the content in being quite over the top, which is what you expect from Depp these days (who, incidentally has improved his cockney accent since From Hell), but in this he is joined by his co-stars. It has a nice Gothic atmosphere, but I thought the staging was a little bare - it would probably look great on stage, but for a complete film a little more was needed than an animated sweep of the city's rooftops to flesh out the setting.
I admired the attempt to allow us to sympathise with Todd a bit more by giving him a tragic romantic back story, so that we are at first pretty much on his side in his plan for revenge, but any sympathy was lost when he failed to help to rescue his daughter in favour of practising his throat slitting on unsuspecting customers. I can understand that his humanity has been lost to his thirst for revenge, but not while he still has a chance to rescue his daughter and redeem himself.
On a side note, concerning the behaviour of cinema audiences...
WARNING: "Sweeney Todd" spoilers below
A woman sitting next to me, guessed a plot twist just as it was about to be revealed and whispered it twice, loudly, to her husband. Now she has just spoiled the film for those who did not guess and made herself look really stupid to everyone else who had already guessed it several minutes earlier...
3.5/5