Let's tell it like it is, here.  Tim Burton's dark vision is of himself as a younger, more attractive cross between Robert Smith and an anime character.  That's why he always hires heartthrob Johnny Depp to play himsel-whoops, I mean his leads, in all of his movies.
 In truth, Tim Burton looks just like a gene splicing three-way between Rick Ocasek , Siouxie Sioux and Huckleberry Hound.
 
Before I start trashing Tim Burton's new adaptation of Sweeney Todd, I must say two things.  The first is that I consider myself a Tim Burton fan.  So anything I'm saying here isn't just me being a bitch...it's Tough Love.  Tim, baby, you need an intervention.  We are your friends, and we don't want to see you go out like this.  Fergodsake, listen to me, Timmy!  It's for your own good!

The second thing I must make note of before I commence the brutality is that I watched TB's version of Sweeney Todd raw, a Sweeney Virgin, if you will.  So you can cut the "you're just a Sondheim purist" jazz right now.  I will  say, however, that after seeing Burton's version,  I went out and got the dvd of the famous stage version with George Hern and Angela Lansbury, and it was mindblowingly good.  That said, I will be making comparisons between the two versions throughout this piece.  But you should know that I had no preconceptions when I came to Burton's Sweeney.  The whole thing was very scientific. 

After the sound drubbing I'm about to give this movie, you're probably going to think I hated it, but actually, I thought it was okay.   Better that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, at least, which had a creep factor of, oh, about a gazillion.  People make a big thing about Burton's Sweeney Todd being gory, but that, to me, wasn't a drawback, especially compared to the utter ickiness of Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka, who makes one's skin crawl before he even speaks a line.  He takes Gene Wilder's gentle (and dare I say, a li'l bit sexy) Wonka and turns him into a mincing spazz who probably has the bodies of dead children stacked in his factory basement.  Now, that's terror.

The sad thing about Burton is that he once was a director with real promise.  Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, (and even Batman and the critically panned Batman Returns) all had a sort of cracked charm.  They were creepy, but in a warm fuzzy way. Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, in particular, are enjoyably odd little tales that are beautiful to behold.  Tim Burton has...or at least had... a unique aesthetic, most gorgeously realized in The Nightmare Before Christmas, which, sadly for him, he neither wrote nor directed.

  But being a director with promise and being a director with genius are two different things, and all that early praise seems to have gone to Tim's head.  It's easy to be your own golden goose when anything you shit out is treated like pure gold.  Burton's "vision" has become an affectation.  Is the movie dark?  Make it darker!  Darker I say!  Are the stars thin and  beautiful and pale with big, big, sad puppy eyes ?  Make 'em paler!  Sadder!  I don't want eyes, I want two black holes in the middle of their faces!

Hence, we have Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as Sweeney and Mrs. Lovetts.  Both are beautiful, both pale, and neither can really sing, at least, not in the way that Sweeney Todd needs to be sung.

They are both just a little too young for their roles...or at least too young-looking.  Mrs. Lovetts, in particular, seems that she should be a bit more blowsy and hard.  It's not that I think Bonham Carter did a bad job in the role, but she's just too doll-faced to really pull off "slatternly". 

It doesn't help that Burton has directed both she and Depp in to a dull, lifeless corner.  Any moments that begin to border on the delightful are quickly squelched by the insistence that this is a serious movie, dammit!   Not just some Broadway frippery. Songs that are supposed to be funny are barely amusing.  Songs that are sad are maudlin.  Any urges towards theatricality are shut down by Burton's insistence that, though this is a musical, it's not going to be y'know, all musical-y.  

I watched the dvd extras afterwards and it turns out (surprise!) that Tim Burton doesn't like musicals.   Which leads one to ask: well then, why the fuck is he making one?  The only song that really sings is "By the Sea", a frilly little island number in which Mrs. Lovetts fantasizes about getting the hell out of London (and the way Burton paints London, who can blame her?).  It is the only moment when Burton allows himself a little directorial license, whisking Depp and Carter away to exotic locales through the benefit of Lovett's imaginings.  And it's actually pretty funny to see Depp's unsmiling, hollow-eyed Todd sitting like a lump on a beach in a ribboned boater.  This is the only number that is more successful than the stage version.  

Johnny Depp got a lot of props for his portrayal of Todd, but I'm not sure why.  He adopts a broad British accent and sneers his way through songs like he's Trent Reznor. (On second thought, that's giving him too much credit.  Really, he's more like David Cook from American Idol.)  His one note is Dour.  He spends the majority of the film scowling, barely blinking, unmoved and unmoving.  It makes you wonder what Mrs. Lovetts sees in him, since he clearly could care less.

Steven Sondheim himself did the arrangements, cutting his original stage musical from a hefty three hour opus down to the film's not-inconsiderable running time of  116 minutes.  Sondheim, in the interview footage, claims to like this version of Sweeney Todd, but  who's to say that he's being honest?  He can't very well say in the dvd extras that he thinks Sweeney Todd is a flaming pile of shit, can he?  Still, it's hard to believe that he enjoys slashing his own score to ribbons.  (Then again, Sondheim once said in an interview that he doesn't like the film version of West Side Story.  So maybe he's just got bad taste in movies.)

 It is not so much what the movie does as what it fails to do that is its downfall.  The cuts are noticeable.  Absent are the choir of the dead who ring in the tale and occasionally pass comment throughout, a damning Greek chorus.  Instead the haunting choir is reduced a mere ghost, rattling its chains through the score.  Even watching Burton's Todd without having seen the original version, one senses that something in the music is missing.
It's a particular  tragedy to hear what a hash has been made of the song "Johanna".  Burton's Anthony is not assertive enough to pull off the vocal fireworks to make the audience believe this very important song.  It is the heart of the piece.  Again, it's hard to really blame the actors here.  Burton seems not to know which bits of Sweeney are important and which parts are not.   Actually, he seems not to even understand what's good about his own film.  For instance, he wastes a pitch-perfect Sacha Baron Cohen in a scene that could be hilarious but is only cute, afraid to play it too broad.

   Burton's consistent mistake seems to be his fear of seeming campy, playing it too much for laughs or too much for tears. (I must make a side note here:  I find it ironic that the man who made Ed Wood should be so loathe to appear campy .  Apparently, Burton has a different vision of himself than the rest of us do.)  Sweeney Todd is, after all, a tragedy, and a little bit of melodrama isn't out of place here.  This is a fact that the satge version never lets us forget, as when the young sailor, Anthony, buys a bird for Johanna, and the seller informs him that the reason the birds sing so prettily is that: "We blinds 'em, so's they don't know if it's day or night."  Moments later, the bird is killed by the Beadle, who cruelly snaps its little neck in his bare hand.  Oddly, Burton's "dark" version leaves such evil little details on the cutting floor. 

And what of Burton's darkness, anyway?  In some ways, the advent of CGI has worked against Burton.  It makes it too easy to achieve the gothic murkiness that is his trademark.  His London is perpetually bathed in that desaturated blue light that is now de rigeur for lazy film directors who want their movies to look bleak.   It's a cheap shorthand for psychic distress, and it's become a cliche.  In the Goode Olde days (like, 1992), fantastic sets had to be built.  Now, everything is greenscreened.  In the case of Sweeney Todd and Tim Burton, CGI only serves to make his work look just as bland and 2-dimensional as everybody else's.
 This is another telling contrast between the stage version and the film version; the stage version uses a minimal set to turn a shallow stage into a vast and secret city.  However, for all the infinitude of tools and possibilities inherent in film as a genre, the movie Sweeney feels stagey and unreal.

Sweeney Todd is the worst kind of disappointment; a semi-earnest attempt by able folks who should know what they're doing  by now, but don't have the cojones to play it for all it's worth.  At least when a movie is just out and out bad, you can enjoy it for its glorious badness.  But with Sweeney Todd, as with so many of Burton's more recent oeuvre, you're left only with the frustrating sense of what might have been, if only a certain lazy director would deflate his bloated ego and put his ass on the line once again.    It's remarkable, actually; Tim Burton seems to be de-evolving before our very eyes, like Deana Troi turning into a lizard in that one episode of Star Trek.

A camp genius who's forgotten that he's campy?  Where have we heard that before?  (cough, cough-Lucas!-cough..)There's a special kind of disappointment for auteurs whose early work that shows they've got potential for greatness turns by default into their great work.  If I could only close my eyes and repeat, "Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!"  Maybe Michael Keaton would ride in on a giant sandworm and replace Tim Burton the elder with his former self. 

Or at the very least, eat him.