In theaters.
Mysteries—everything from detective stories to police procedurals to tales of random people stumbling upon crimes—have been a guilty pleasure of mine for years, but serial killers have always been my least favorite type of subject. They don’t interest me because their motives are all but incomprehensible. They’re not functioning as normal people. Every fictional serial killer (I can’t pretend to know anything about the real ones) lives in his own universe, with obscure, arbitrary rules that don’t make much sense from the outside. In short, a serial killer is crazy, and his madness bores me.
I mention this because, intellectually, I don’t think Sweeney Todd is a bad musical or a bad movie, but emotionally, it leaves me so unmoved, so indifferent, that I giggled through half the film. Maybe Johnny Depp’s performance is too opaque, maybe Tim Burton’s direction is too garishly gothic, but to be fair, maybe it’s just me.
Much Review About Nothing 