My only question is why did this film end so abruptly?

Sweeney Todd follows the murderous barber who has spent 15 years in jail for a crime that he did not commit just so the Judge could steal away his wife and child, as he liked the look of her. He is now back in London and has opened a barbershop where he is hoping to inact his revenge on the Judge and win his daughter back.

I know both are made by Tim Burton but I couldn’t help noticing the similarities between this film and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They both star Johnny Depp, they’re both set in Victorian England when things are dire, and both of their title sequences are very similar. That was the one thing that let me down with this film was the title sequence, it was so cartoonish that it really juxtaposed the horror and realism of the actual film and I could happily do without it.

The actual film however was very interesting. I enjoyed the musical element to it, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are of course brilliant in their roles and the story was really interesting and kept me watching. I get this was the style of the film but I did find the blood a bit too tomato sauce-like for my liking and being an 18 rated film already I would’ve loved a bit more realism to it. When the bodies fell from the chair into the sewer below that was really shocking and hard to watch, yet them having their throats cut just looked like they’d spilt some tomato ketchup on their shirt and didn’t thrill me too much.

I would recommend this film to people who don’t mind a bit of gore and violence and who also like musicals, but don’t want musicals to always be happy fun times. This is a very dark and horrifying tale and so I like that the music is funny at times, enjoyable but also doesn’t have that happy ending stupidness that we see from most musicals. This is a dark film and I really enjoyed that fact about it because if it was a happy film it wouldn’t work at all.

And as I said at the start the only thing that lets it down for me was the ending (as well as the title sequence), it felt far too quick, we don’t know what happened to his daughter or the boy that wanted to marry her. We don’t really know what happens to the pie shop and it just left a lot of loose ends in my eyes that I would like to be tied up a bit more. But like I said, I don’t always want musicals to be happy and light-hearted, but I do want a story to have at least an ending where I feel that I can go away from this film knowing what happened and be happy with the conclusion.

What do you think of Sweeney Todd?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding