Director: Tim Burton, 18, 95min

Stars: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter

The revenge movie gets a Gothic musical makeover thanks to Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Stephen Sondheim. The latter’s 1979 hit musical featured an 18th-century London barber newly returned from false imprisonment in Australia and reeking furious vengeance. He does this with the help of his pie-baking landlady Mrs Lovett, and lots, and lots, of singing.

Thus the hype and speculation generated around Burton’s Sweeney Todd has focused almost exclusively on the vocal challenges faced by stars Depp (as Todd) and Bonham Carter (as Lovett) – can they sing? Can they convince? Will they hit the high notes? The answer, of course, is that they sing perfectly well (though Depp does a few too many bars of Rex Harrison style talky-singing). But the great communal sigh of relief and the subsequent adulation that has followed this revelation have somehow obscured the fact that Sweeney is only a minor work – visually ravishing, and buoyed by Sondheim’s sweet lyrical élan – but certainly not Burton at his best.

The film has a relentless linearity to it. Todd announces, in an early musical number, that he “will have vengeance”, and then he does just that for the next 60 minutes.

The songs are amiably lilting and melodic without ever once producing a barnstorming set-piece singalong. And while Depp and Bonham Carter are both beautiful to look at, they generated far more screen heat in their previous musical collaboration with Burton, The Corpse Bride. In that superlative film, a simple piano duet between Depp and Bonham Carter’s marionette doppelgängers unearthed more genuine human emotion than anything found in the full-length feature of lovingly crafted whimsy that is Sweeney Todd.

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