I’ve just seen Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Even for Johnny Depp, this is a very dark (and also comic) melodrama. Some scenes are hilarious; I could not stop laughing. However, I also squinted through graphic bloodletting in the many extremely violent scenes.
The moral is what makes this film really worthwhile: vengefulness is a twisted, dangerous, and terrible path; a universal and indiscriminate destroyer. You have to be convinced of this by the end of the film, or a lot of blood has been spilled in vain. (OK, there’s also Johnny Depp, a big plus, for fans, plus the actors who play Snape (Alan Rickman) and Wormtail (Timothy Spall) from the Harry Potter films.)
This is certainly not for kids–I hope. The story is actually and visually intense, and I left the theater wanting to catch my breath. But now that I have, I’m ready to see it again.
