STUDIO: DreamWorks
RELEASE DATE: October 21, 2008
STARRING: Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, Timothy Spall, and Sacha Baron Cohen
WRITTEN BY: John Logan
DIRECTED BY: Tim Burton
FEATURES: Burton + Depp + Carter = Todd
Sweeney Todd Press Conference
Sweeney Todd is Alive: The Real History of The Demon Barber
Musical Mayhem: Sondheim's Sweeney Todd
Sweeney's London
The Making of Sweeney Todd
Grand Guignol: A Theatrical Tradition
Designs for a Demon Barber
A Bloody Business
Moviefone Unscripted with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp
The Razor's Refrain
Photo Gallery
Theatrical Trailer

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was made for Blu-Ray. It's the kind of visually stunning film that could be used to sell HDTVs if a store wasn't worried about the blood and guts scaring the wee ones. DreamWorks has proven, particularly with the gorgeous transfer on Transformers, that they have mastered the technical specs of the Blu-Ray format and they've done it again with a technically masterful film being given the treatment it deserves for next-generation systems. Sweeney Todd on Blu-Ray is sensory overload with some of the most vibrant colors yet produced on the format. The Dolby True HD 5.1 track isn't as stunning as some of the recent releases like Transformers or Iron Man, but very few people will notice any flaws in it. Their jaws will be on the floor from the picture.

But to what end? What about the movie itself? By now, most people are familiar with Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street but it's not too soon to ask how history will regard this film and I'm sorry to say that I don't think it will be too kindly. I LOVE Tim Burton and just the idea of a gore-filled musical directed by the master of dark humor and starring his muse, Johnny Depp, filled me with anticipatory glee. The material, the costumes, the buckets of blood - it's a fastball down the middle, and Burton should be able to knock it out of the park. But he doesn't. It's definitely a hit, but more of a ground-rule double. And even the fans who claimed to adore Sweeney Todd in theaters (some before they even saw it) are admitting now that the film is not the beloved goth musical classic that we all hoped it would be when the project was first announced. It's a technical accomplishment, for sure, and that makes it particularly worth seeing on Blu-Ray for it's incredible art direction, costumes, and cinematography, but Sweeney Todd definitely falls short of the very lofty expectations set by its history and the pedigree of the people involved in making it.

I must admit - there is a chance that Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street could be the best possible version of Sondheim's play. In other words, it could be the weakness of the source material, which has been pared down from its three-hour stage version to its bare essentials by regular Burton collaborator John Logan. Depp plays Benjamin Barker, a once happy man with a wife and child who was falsely imprisoned and his family stolen from him. Years later, he returns to London, takes up residence above a meat pie shop owned by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), and finds an unusual way to get his revenge on not only the people that wronged him and his family, but also the ones who turned a blind eye as injustice was done. Barker changes his name to Sweeney Todd and comes home with a young man named Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower), who falls for the comely lass in town named Johanna. Johanna is being held captive by the nefarious Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who rules the town with his sidekick, Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall). Mr. Todd comes up with a vicious plan to get his vengeance, give Mrs. Lovett some business, and even help Anthony save the fair Johanna. And it all comes with a song, a dance, and buckets of blood.

The problem with Sweeney Todd is simple - as more and more of the poor denizens of Todd's 'hood get sliced and diced, and the plot moves us closer to the characters we care about getting the blade, Sweeney Todd never pulls the audience in. To put it bluntly, you'll never care. It's incredibly easy to admire the technical accomplishments of Sweeney Todd. It looks and sounds great in HD picture and sound. The music, the editing, the costume choices are all without technical flaw, but perhaps that's the flaw itself. Sweeney Todd is a film about vile, damaged people that never feels quite dirty enough. When you're busy admiring the production design, it's hard to truly care about the emotions going on within it. Burton has long been a detached director, but since he opened his emotional side a bit with Big Fish and was somewhat critically derided for getting too mushy, it feels like he's gotten colder, eschewing real emotion for technical mastery. The problem is you need both to make a truly memorable film.

However, while the film leaves me a bit cold, the Blu-Ray presentation for Sweeney Todd does not. This is another stellar release from DreamWorks, a company that I expect will release nothing but on the format. Don't expect bare-bones, technically flawed presentations from the house that Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen built. Besides the video that I've already lauded, fans of Sweeney Todd will find an EXTENSIVE selection of special features. It's hard to imagine that there's any element of the film that you might be curious about that you won't have your questions answered in the featurettes. It would be nice to have a picture-in-picture capability and the lack of a commentary track is disappointing, but it almost certainly would have been repetitive with the informative featurettes. No, with Sweeney Todd, the movie stands alone without p-i-p featurettes, trivia, or commentary. Perhaps it's appropriate that a film that lives and dies on its visual expertise not be cluttered with anything else.