"Orright Meery Pappins?" - return of the fake Mockney accent.

Rating: 5/10 (19 August 2003)

The movie was enjoyable enough. Good atmosphere, not a bad plot (making the Ripper a political murder was certainly a new twist), good set design, good lighting, plenty of gore and so on.
There was however one person involved with this film who completely ruined it for me. That person should be buried in sand at least a cable's length from the shore. Who was this person? Johnny Depp's voice coach, that's who. That accent was just plain wrong in several respects.
Firstly it wasn't a London accent - presumably it was meant to be a Cockney accent but they didn't even try for generic "London". It was an "Estuary" accent - a sort of mishmash generalised "South East England" accent which has become widespread on TV over the past 15-20 years . In US terms, let's say they'd taken a Trenton, NJ accent and said "OK, that's close enough to a Brooklyn accent; they're both in the north-eastern US" when it MATTERED that the speaker was from Brooklyn.
Secondly an accent like that would not (even in the 21st century) denote "middle-class" (as Depps character was described); it's a very working class accent. Nothing in the least wrong with that, but it simply doesn't work (and it's simply not conceivable that someone would have made his way up from the "working classes" to become a police Inspector in the 1880s). Thirdly, and what wrecked it for me completely, was that Depp's voice coach had Depp doing a more-than-workmanlike impression of David Beckham (English soccer player and alleged style icon). The impression was so accurate that I have to believe he did it on purpose. I kept waiting for the Inspector to start discussing England's chances of qualifying for the European Soccer Championships!