DVD Vault Flashback: Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

Until tonight my only experience with Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) was a fantastic high school production I saw early in my career in education. Tonight I was surprised at how much of the story I still remembered and how long it takes for Sweeney Todd to construct the chair and start killing people wholesale. The killing montage doesn’t occur until about an hour and fifteen minutes and I was feeling the runtime.

Many consider Sweeney Todd to be Tim Burton’s last good film until Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (2024) and I’ll mostly agree with that. If I were to simplify my evaluation I’d say the movie is “good.” To be more specific, mostly everything works well enough to very well. The Sondheim songs are fantastic, as are the many many throat cuts, and I thoroughly enjoyed Sacha Baron Cohen as a fake Italian stereotype. I also appreciate the movie’s nihilism and the scene of Alan Rickman sentencing a child to hang is a perfect example of it.

However, as a product of the god-awful decade that was the 2000’s, Sweeney Todd basks in its emo to a frustrating degree with Johnny Depp putting in a fairly uninteresting performance as a brooding Byronic hero set loose in a boring, colorless Dickensian-style re-creation of the working class Fleet Street of Victorian London. The only scene in which any color pops aside from red is Mrs. Lovett’s absurd fantasy sequence and even that looks pretty dull; it’s partly the intent of the film and partly Burton’s style, but there are Burton movies that look gorgeous in every frame while using as little color, such as Batman Returns (1992). The difference between Batman Returns and Sweeney Todd: an inspired director.