The opportunity to film the stage hit "Sweeney Todd" must have seemed a gift from God for Tim Burton, a property singularly suited for his talents and interests, in which he could star his favorite actor and alter ego, Johnny Depp, and his significant other, Helena Bonham Carter. The combination of a dark, bizarrely Gothic subject and a cast of actors willing to take on challenging, even risky roles makes "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" something like the perfect Burton movie.

After the successful London stage play and the hit Broadway musical, the work should be familiar to most audiences, a retelling of the story of the legendary barber who systematically slaughtered his clients, and his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, who thriftily transformed the results into the best meat pies in London. "Sweeney Todd" begins his murderous career as a returned convict unjustly sent to Australia 15 years ago, now seeking vengeance for the abduction of his wife and daughter by the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman). He kills his first victim, a rival barber named Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen), who threatens to reveal Todd's history, and proceeds rapidly from that point to butchering scores of Londoners, working his way toward the judge and his oleaginous sycophant, Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall).

A secondary plot involves a young sailor named Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower), who falls in love, at first sight, with the barber's now grown daughter, Johanna (Jayne Wisener), whom Judge Turpin has made his ward. That plot depends upon further twists and additional melodrama, including Anthony's rescue of Johanna from the insane asylum where the judge sequesters her as punishment for spurning his amorous advances. All of the plots and characters, including one whose presence in effect explains the whole story, intersect in a final sequence at the barber shop, where a bloody fate resolves the action.

Because "Sweeney Todd" is nominally a musical, the actors - most of them nonmusical - must sing Stephen Sondheim's songs, and all of them - Depp, Carter, Rickman, Spall - accomplish the task with surprising success. Since the songs generally cover a range of mostly negative subjects, like bitterness, hatred, revenge, loss, and so forth, the lack of musicianship and lyricism suits the themes, and the voices of the nonsingers seem entirely appropriate to the material. Although the lyrics exhibit considerable wit and passion, the music itself sounds much the same throughout the movie, which may also assist actors unaccustomed to singing.

Actually a kind of tragicomic operetta, "Sweeney Todd" begins on a dark, angry note and hardly ever strays from those emotions, which means that despite all the praise for his work, Johnny Depp's performance maintains a tiresome sameness throughout. He snarls and sneers and slashes, looking at times like a character from one of Tim Burton's animated films, an effect enhanced by the corpse-like white makeup that covers his face. Assisted by that striking pallor, he and Helena Bonham Carter resemble each other so closely that his history in Burton's films and her relationship with the director suggest something even stranger than the barber's barbarism.

What decidedly mixed success the film achieves derives as much from its sets and atmosphere as from its singing and acting. The narrow, murky streets, the overwhelming filth, the enveloping shroud of darkness, the constant reminders of the stench of sewers, the cruel treatment of children, the subjects of wards, workhouses, and orphanages, the general squalor all recall the London of Dickens's novels. The burning corpses, the entrails and body parts, the cannibalism of the meat pies - a toe turns up in one of them, a nicely grisly touch, though perhaps typical of British cuisine - underline the horror of the so-called musical.

When Todd slashes the throats of his innumerable victims, and they geyser blood all over the scenery, the movie turns into something like a Victorian "Texas Chain Saw Massacre," while the final sequence, showing a set strewn with corpses, recalls the climax of "Hamlet." "Sweeney Todd" ultimately seems more a work of horror than of music, a shocker for viewers who would scorn such classics as "The Devil's Rejects" or "I Dismember Mama," which this movie, amazingly, outslashes. 

Sweeney Todd

(R), directed by Tim Burton.

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