Wish I'd been made to care more.

Rating: Null/10 (20 October 2001)

First off I haven't read the graphic novel that every review I've read has mentioned, so I don't care if it did or didn't do justice to that source. Just came to it as a Jack the Ripper movie. The trailer suggested it would knock my socks off. It didn't, but I understand there were ratings considerations (as always) with the best stuff being saved for DVD. Anyway this movie gets an A for effort for atmosphere and period detail, they really laid it on, down to the pimp's rotten tooth. That alone mostly carried it for me, but I found it oddly uninvolving for the most part. Partly there's the problem of doing historical events, whether murders or something else, we know in advance what happened which eliminates much suspense. But the murders here seemed almost perfunctory; when it was each victim's "turn" she was conveniently alone on a deserted street just like the sleazy horror flicks we all laugh at. No real terror ever generated. Only the proto-lobotomy scenes (& their aftermath) were truly horrifying. A lot of the conspiracy stuff reminded me of "X-Files," yanked me out of the period, likewise Depp's "visions" a la "Millennium" or "Profiler." I know there was much drug use back then but would a hophead cop really have been tolerated, let alone be an Inspector? It would've been interesting to see more details of Victorian police procedure, grilling suspects etc. (Fritz Lang's "M," also based on a real serial killer, was almost documentary in that sense.) In fact the cops barely seemed to exist. I seem to be the only one who didn't have a problem with Heather Graham or her accent except that originally she was supposedly Irish & I didn't hear any of that in her voice. She looked pretty but not "Hollywood," I thought. Hey, nowadays there're beautiful women who do porn flicks, what's their excuse? The ending was anticlimactic and disappointing, almost made me glad I hadn't been made to care too much about these people. Depp was okay, the old English theater guys were fun, but Robbie Coltrane lit up the screen as always, just wish he'd been given more to do. Ultimately the movie's a nice foggy ride but could've used the ballocks of the Hughes' earlier black urban flicks, it's like they felt they had to curtsy here.