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9 of 10 found the following review helpful:
 An Interesting But Somewhat Slow Variation On The Famous London Story Dec 26, 2007
By Gary F. Taylor
"GFT"
Although some have tried to argue that he was an actual person, it seems likely that the story of a throat-cutting barber named Sweeney Todd arose first as a bit of urban myth that was developed into an 1846 story titled THE STRING OF PEARLS by writer Thomas Prest. A year later the story was adapted to the stage as SWEENEY TODD, THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET. It proved a popular ticket, and in age that knew little of copyright law, versions of the play were soon springing up all over the place, each one tweaking the story a little bit in the process. Consequently, it is almost impossible to say that any one particular version is "more authentic" than any other.
In this particular version, filmed for BBC in 2006, Todd (Ray Winstone)is a barber who spent twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Released, he finds himself shaving a prison guard and on sudden impulse slits the man's throat. One thing leads to another, as you might say, and he soon makes the acquaintance of bake-shop worker Mrs. Lovett (Essie Davis); his fondness for her not only leads him to set her up in her own business, but to supply the occasional cut of meat as well. The twist to this particular version of the story is in the relationship between Todd and Lovett, the latter of whom is more sinned against than sinning.
The script is quite clever, essentially winding most of Todd's motives (including his interest in Mrs. Lovett) around his own mistreatment while an inmate of the notorious Newgate prison, and both Winstone and Davis are extremely impressive in their performances. But for all the blood, and there is aplenty, and for all the sex, and there is some, the film looks exactly like what it is: a made-for-television movie. It is also rather slow and quite often a bit too "stiff upper lip" for its own good.
The DVD release offers a good transfer but, excepting cast credits, nothing in the way of bonus material. Those interested in the various directions the story has taken will find it intriguing, but most others will likely be only mildly interested.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Winstone shines, as usual. Jun 26, 2009
By Robert P. Beveridge
"xterminal"
Sweeney Todd (Dave Moore, 2006)
Sometime in the past decade or so, Ray Winstone has quietly gone from being a stock heavy (for example, in 1997's brilliant heist flick Face) to being one of Britain's best, and most versatile, actors. Nowhere has he shown this more than in Dave Moore's striking adaptation of Sweeney Todd, with Winstone playing the title character. A number of film versions of this story that I've seen have been simplified, glossing over some of the darker elements of the story (which is an odd thing to say about a story whose central figure is a serial killer), but Moore (Wallis and Edward) revels in the stuff that's outside the realm of the accepted, and it shows.
In case you've been living in a cave the past few hundred years, Sweeney Todd is a delicate, uplifting love story involving the title character (Winstone), a London barber (remember that back in the day, barbers also performed surgery) and the woman down the street, Mrs. Lovett (Girl with a Pearl Earring's Essie Davis), a former prostitute who now runs a pie shop. The two form a symbiotic relationship; Lovett refers folks to Todd. Todd kills them, then returns the bodies to Lovett, who makes them into pies. Free meat! Bigger profits, and it's probably better than you'd get from your local Megacorp. Needless to say, the police are concerned about the large number of disappearances, and Mrs. Lovett's husband, a nasty brute of a man, is starting to get suspicious. Needless to say, the bodies keep piling up. Didn't I say it was uplifting?
The Sweeney Todd bio has been done about a thousand times on stage and screen, with varying degrees of effectiveness. This one is done very well indeed, especially for a TV movie. Moore refuses to pull any punches, keeping within the bounds of television appropriateness by implying, rather than showing, many if the nastier bits. Still, if you record this thinking you're getting the Tim Burton version, be aware that this one, while not explicit, is still not for the smaller kiddies. For everyone else, though, it's an effective, wonderfully-acted treatment of the subject, and it's well worth watching. *** ½
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 An Engrossing Variation on a Dark Legend of Love and Murder Aug 01, 2008
By Stephanie DePue
"Sweeney Todd: The Director's Cut," a 2006 television production of the classic horror story for the British Broadcasting Corporation, reached these shores as a DVD in 2007. It stars Ray Winstone (Sexy Beast,Beowulf), in the title role; was written by Joshua St. Johnston and directed by David Moore. As a director's cut, it includes footage not seen in the broadcast - beware, sensitive souls, it's intensely violent. It also boasts a Sweeney Todd background essay, cast filmographies, and, thank goodness, unadvertised closed captioning: characters in this movie are doing their best to speak early London English. The movie is set in eighteenth century London, where the first, Victorian treatment of this famous horror tale placed it; it runs about an hour and a half.
The award-winning Winstone, who is of cockney origins himself, and a former boxer, succeeds in making the demon barber of Fleet Street a believable human being. Essie Davis (Girl With a Pearl Earring) makes Mrs. Lovett into a lusty young woman, more sinned-against than sinning. And the veteran David Warner (Titanic, Tom Jones (1963),) makes his blind police chief Fielding quite credible, and moving.
The basic plot, of course, is known to all: in filthy, teeming, unsanitary, unhealthy eighteenth century London, Todd, the expert barber, murders the odd customer, whose flesh turns up in his neighbor Mrs. Lovett's meat pies, making them the delicious toast of London. In this treatment of the material, a substantial backstory has been given Todd, making his actions more explicable: he works and lives in the shadow of the hellhole London prison Newgate, where he grew up as a child, spending twenty years of his life there for a murder committed by his father - it's where he learned his trade. Upon his release, the advent of a brutal Newgate prison guard in his barber's chair sets loose his anger, and murderous impulses. And soon carved up bodies begin appearing in what remains of the once sparkling, pristine Fleet River, now known as the Fleet Ditch. Another quite interesting innovation of the script is to remind us that, in those days, barbers doubled as surgeons: the blood of that trade is what the red stood for in all those old-fashioned barber's red and white striped poles that we occasionally see. As a surgeon, Todd does, of course, see plenty of blood; he also must have a rough and ready knowledge of the human body, sufficient to operate, or to butcher.
The plot also gives us a brief homage to the earliest substantial literary treatment of Sweeney Todd, "The String of Pearls," an anonymously authored tale told in serial form in early Victorian days. We have a Mr. Thornhill with a string of beautiful pearls, a major actor in the first treatment. Todd's young boy apprentice continues to be called Tobias, as he first was, and generally still is. Praises be the icky star-crossed young lovers, major, and weakest ingredient of the original tale, are gone. The Sweeney Todd tale may be based on an urban myth, or there may, or may not be a real inspiration to it. Robert L. Mack, in his excellent book on the subject, (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, US & Canada Ed.), reviewed by me on its subject page, cites to an eighteenth century French newspaper.
What is certainly true is the fascinating, sad history of the Fleet River, treated by me, at greater length, in reviewing the Johnny Depp Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. We see the river here, narrowed to the width of a street, hemmed in by structures on both sides; and, briefly, at low tide, displaying a filthy, gruesome river bed. It is bridged here, but it was to be entirely bridged over, covered in wood so that it could be built over, and was so polluted it burst into flames, burning all around it. When the area was eventually rebuilt, the river's legacy was to be all those subterranean tunnels that proved so handy to Todd.
Winstone's powerful performance hoists this film well above the ordinary TV movie, though it does lack some of the richness of a film made for theatrical release. But it's an engrossing, and haunting variation on a dark legend of love and murder.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
"Why? Because I Could...And Then I Couldn't Not..." Feb 10, 2010
By darklordzden
"darklordzden"
London, The Eighteenth Century: Sweeney Todd (Ray Winstone) ekes out an existence as a surgeon barber on the streets of an overcrowded British Metropolis which has been transformed into a purgatory of poverty, deprivation, despair and feculence by the ceaseless, implacable forces of the industrial revolution. Todd himself is a lonely, reclusive man who is haunted by the indignities suffered during a twenty year tenure inside the city's notorious Newgate prison (after being wrongly convicted of a crime for which his ne'er-do-well father was actually responsible). One foggy evening, an abrasive jailer from the prison enters Todd's shop and, during the course of his shave, engages the fragile barber in a boastful conversation concerning the conditions inside the prison. In one climatic moment, twenty years of repressed rage explodes to the homicidal fore and Todd's straight-razor is put to devastating use. The jailer is Todd's first kill, but before his reign of terror is over, he will be very far from the last...
If you only watch one screen adaptation of the legend of "Sweeney Todd", eschew the rest - including the big budget musical directed by Tim Burton - and make it this television adaptation from 2006.
Why?
Because, pound for pound, it is the most profoundly disturbing, brilliantly acted and subtly rendered portrait of this mythical murderer to yet make it to the screen.
Ray Winstone is nothing short of a revelation as the morose, emotionally scarred child-man whose compulsive need to kill is driven as much by his own trauma and sense of existential emptiness as his sense of nihilism. And yet even in the depths of his homicidal impulses, Winstone manages to imbue the character with a profound sense of remorse, a touching innocence and even a twisted sense of morality. It's a magnificently nuanced performance which is underplayed to perfection by an actor generally not allowed to express such subtlety onscreen in his usual "tough guy" roles. Winstone is ably supported by a cast that includes the luminescent Essie Davis, veteran actor David Warner and "Mad-Max-In-Waiting" Tom Hardy who all perfectly portray the various innocents inadvertently drawn into (and transformed by) Todd's heinously magnetic sphere of influence.
The filth and poverty of Eighteenth century London is expertly rendered onscreen with Bucharest convincingly standing in for the city. One is almost overwhelmed by the stale scent of perfumed wigs, failure and grime which seems to permeate the film. The violence of Todd's murders are also convincingly, but not gratuitously, evoked - as are the more barbarous medical practices of the time (a scene in which a character has a Kidney Stone removed - sans anaesthetic - managed to make me wince despite the lack of any onscreen gore).
But what sets this adaptation apart from the rest is the realism with which the director treats his subject matter. Simply put, the only other film which has rendered such a hypnotically convincing and multifaceted vision of psychopathology is John MacNaughton's profoundly brilliant and deeply disturbing film Henry - Portrait of a Serial Killer (20th Anniversary). Indeed, this vision of Sweeney Todd shares much in common with that film in terms of it's themes and it's examination of the motivations and existential ennui of its occasionally sympathetic, deranged protagonist: like Michael Rooker's "Henry", we can see how this character has been molded, even if we cannot stomach his murderous proclivities or really believe (just as he cannot believe) that there can ultimately be any kind of redemption for him.
There is still much conjecture over whether the character of Sweeney Todd, who was originally rendered in the 'Penny Dreadful', "The String Of Pearls", had his basis in the conduct of an actual man. Thanks to the Sondheim musical, the Burton film and over a century of mythology, the bombastic "Demon Barber Of Fleet Street" is the prevalent image of the strange character. But as Todd observes in the course of this film, "if there is hell, it is the one that we make for ourselves" and accordingly it would seem to follow that if there are demons, they are most certainly the ones with which we torture (and make of) ourselves.
Hauntingly good stuff. I recommend this adaptation over all of the others unreservedly.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
A Chilling Tale Masterfully Told Feb 03, 2010
By W. Powell
I enjoyed this movie so much I watched it a second night in a row with friends. They were spellbound while watching and couldn't figure out what was coming next. The story is gripping with its well timed suspense and horrifying scenes. I especially liked how everything about this movie just fit together so well. It was as if you were watching a tragedy unfold before your eyes and all you could do was wait out the inevitable disaster you knew would come. Like watching a runaway train bulldozing its way down the track at a devastating speed. Its not a matter of if it will crash but when.
This version of "Sweeney Todd" brought to life the London of that day, with all its poverty and filth. Sweeney Todd comes across as a man who was just a product of his environment with the respectable skill of a surgeon-barber. The acting was superb with lines that gave depth and meaning to the actions of the characters.
Watch closely because its the little things in this movie that reveal so much of the story.
An Intelligent Tale!
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