Average

Rating: Null/10 (8 August 2007)

Despite playing fairly free and easy with the facts of the Jack the Ripper case, Albert and Allen Hughes still manage to fashion a fairly ordinary tale out of a compelling murder case. Johnny Depp is the laudanum-addicted police detective assigned to uncover the killer of prostitutes in London's Whitechapel area. Depp, exercising his almost-there-but-not-quite English accent, has clairvoyant dreams that help him not one jot in solving the mystery, but which offer the directors the chance to insert some edgy editing.
The film looks good, but is too long and sometimes your attention wanders as the good inspector wanders into an improbable emotional involvement with the prostitute Mary Kelly (Heather Graham, with an accent even wonkier than Depp's). Its solution to the mystery is just about plausible, and skirts around the possible true involvement of a member of royalty, but for some reason the Hughes brothers provide an ambiguous coda that leaves the impression that it all may just be the dream of a dying man. It's a strange choice, a bizarre perversion of the 'he woke up to discover it was all a dream' cliché that fails to work