Sweeney Todd (2007)
I like Johnny Depp. I’ve liked Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands. So I thought I would like Sweeney Todd. I thought the quality of the production and acting (Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen and Alan Rickman) would outweigh the dark and gory aspects of the film.
I was wrong.
The film is so dark, and so relentlessly gory, that I spent much of it gazing at the ceiling, waiting for scenes to be done. It’s embarrassing to admit I didn’t like the film because it was too dark and gory. What did I expect? Perhaps a little more humanity, a lot less blood and violence. But the acting, the look of the film, and the singing were all top notch. And it was interesting to see the pregnant Bonham Carter’s bust and belly change size, sometimes even within a scene, depending on when the scenes were filmed.
June 23rd, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I actually didn’t find it very gory at all. The gore was so stylized, more like lots of strawberry jam than lots of blood. Felt more comical to me (but in a good way).
(Another potentially gory but instead comical thing: the scenes with the bodies dumping down and hitting the floor, over and over. Hilarious!)
My pet peeve was how in the first five minutes, they didn’t sync up the sound well enough so the vocals & the lip movements didn’t match. But I got past that.
I wound up REALLY liking it.
June 23rd, 2008 at 4:29 pm
I felt the same way you did. Once I saw how horrible the throat-slashing scenes were going to be, I “watched” those scenes with my eyes closed and ears plugged. Shudder.
June 24th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Oh, I flinched every time one of the bodies went down the chute. Maybe I was in too bad a mood to appreciate it; if I’d been in a better place, perhaps I would’ve gotten the joke. Yes, the gore _was_ stylized, and skillfully stylized at that, but there was a viciousness to the slashing scenes that I couldn’t get past.