The material, a Gothic yarn of bloody revenge, seems specially suited for the macabre hand of Tim Burton, but alas, such is not the case. To compliment Burton's ability to transport us into worlds—here an ominous one that bares a striking resemblance of 19th century London—as seen through the prism of a nightmare would be redundant. That's why in theory his helming of Stephen Sondheim's dark Broadway musical seems right and why for a decent amount of time the movie works as pure visual spectacle.

It is dark, dreary, and full of sinister bombast, driven by grungy production design, eloquently monochromatic cinematography, and Sondheim's music augmented and enriched to blast the doors off the theater. Then the story proper kicks in, and it becomes sadly apparent that Burton simply isn't the right choice for a musical. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street suffers in the same ways Burton's other, shadowy ventures have succeeded. His cold aesthetics and distanced storytelling do not lend the material any momentum, and the whole affair feels lethargic when it should be lively, monotone when it should be matching Sondheim's musical intricacy.

After some awesome opening credits, Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) returns to London on a ship. A young man named Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) is excited (His surname is no less than Hope), but Sweeney compares the city to a great, black pit, full of people who are full of something that rhymes with pit. Sweeney is the eternally gloomy party-pooper for good reason. He has been wrongfully imprisoned for 15 years, separated from his wife and baby daughter. When he returns to his old barbershop on Fleet Street, he meets Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who runs a shop under his old one and makes the worst meat pies in London.

She fills him in on the news of what happened to the family of Benjamin Barker, now Sweeney, after he was taken away. The malicious Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who devised Sweeney's extradition, tricked his wife to a party, where he drugged and raped her. In shame, she apparently killed herself, and Sweeney's daughter Johanna (Jayne Wisener) is now Turpin's ward. Taking up the tools of his old trade—a glistening set of silver razors—Sweeney vows revenge.

He reestablishes his old business by exposing hair tonic salesman Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen) as a fraud and a second-rate shaver, and soon enough, Turpin's weaselly assistant Beadle (who else but Timothy Spall) has his master at Sweeney's shop.