At first blush, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street looks like a joke about Tim Burton's predictability: lavish adaptation of a black-comic musical, Johnny Depp in the lead, sets elaborate and cartoonishly menacing. Stop me if you've heard this one before. And as over-Burtony as it is in concept, it's even more so in practice. As with every other film Burton's made in the past fifteen years — with the exception of the meek but solid Big Fish — Sweeney starts off strong but outstays its welcome by half an hour.
For those unfamiliar with musicals or Victorian penny-dreadfuls, Sweeney Todd is a nineteenth-century antihero, serial killer and barber known for his habit of murdering people with a straight razor. His accomplice is Mrs. Lovett, who helps dispose of the victims by baking them into pies. Burton's version of the tale is an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation that started as a play by Christopher Bond and was eventually turned into a musical by Stephen Sondheim. Bond and Sondheim's revisions injected some humanity into their killer protagonist. In the musical, Todd isn't just a mad killer but a wrongly imprisoned family man looking for revenge against the judge who convicted him. Burton and Sondheim worked together on translating Sweeney to the screen, and few changes were made to the show proper, save for some wisely cut numbers in the middle. Actually, you wish they'd cut more. Entertaining as tunes like "By the Sea" are, they're inconsequential to the core narrative, and so ill-suited to the pacing of a film. Burton's movie is hurt by their inclusion.
The music, however, is the true star of the show. Sondheim's arrangements and the greatly expanded orchestra — the film is performed with seventy-eight musicians to the play's twenty-seven — deserve particular praise. The cast proper is almost secondary to the music. Stars Depp and Helena Bonham Carter (Mrs. Lovett) perform ably but are little more than pieces of Burton's standard nightmare-dollhouse sets. This is the same mistake that Burton has been making for years, emphasizing his worlds over his characters and failing to give them the humanity that made his early work so good. Sweeney Todd is Burton's fifth live-action adaptation in a row. Here's hoping that he's able to recapture some youthful vitality when he remakes his own Frankenweenie next year. — John Constantine