The satire is an undercurrent in a story that's ostensibly concerned with its overriding Grand Guignol revenger's tragedy. "It's man devouring man out there," sings Sweeney. With their voices mostly eliminated, the extras seem more passively complicit in Barker's fifteen years of wrongful imprisonment. It's an intriguing shift from the stageplay in which the chorus hauntingly tells "the tale of Sweeney Todd" with downtrodden faces and sad judgment. In forbidding Industrial Age London (announced by a credit sequence of blood in the gears), the general public comes off as stupid sheep-hungry consumers all too willing to take what they're given without question-selfish, sinning bastards, or both. "They all deserve to die," Todd says of Londoners. The rub is that Todd slits his customers' throats and Lovett serves their flesh in bestselling meat pies. The vehicle of Sweeney Todd's vengeance turns out to be a stroke of capitalist exploitation: a barber shop outfitted above the pieshop of one Mrs. With his rock-star growl, Depp plays Benjamin Barker, who-under the titular pseudonym-pursues revenge against a corrupt judge (Alan Rickman, the king of velvety evil). What a pleasure it is, then, to report that Burton's version tends more to the abattoir than the amusement park, staying true to the story's aggressively downbeat but sublime fucked-up-ness.īurton's Sweeney Todd takes a little getting used to, but it's worth the effort. So Sondheim's loyal legion of fans girded their loins at the news that Sondheim's 1979 musical thriller Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was to become a major motion picture directed by Tim Burton-American cinema's popular maestro of the weird and wacky-and his favorite star, Johnny Depp. Stephen Sondheim musicals tend to be too smart, too offbeat, too edgy, too challenging for mass appeal. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)īorat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2020) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 (2011)īorat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) When the Road Bends: Tales of a Gypsy Caravan) (2007)