What a missed opportunity

Rating: Null/10 (21 October 2001)

Sorry...this movie was just another "Hollywoodized" version of a classic tale...The ingredients are so predictable..take a good idea, throw in a ridiculous, off-plot love story involving miscast "A-List" actors and deliver it to America on a silver platter for them to devour with passionless enthusiasm...oh, the wasted possibilities...Jack the Ripper has been done and done on film, so why bother if you are going to phony it up for the American Sheep audience who require a ridiculous love story in the most unbelievable fashion...Johnny Depp basically sleep-walked through this movie...and who cast Heather Graham as the dirty, dirty English whore? The other 4 whores were perfectly cast, disgusting and literally dripping with syphilus...but then there is Roller Girl, so beautiful and sexy...sorry, but based on the dirty whore competition that I saw on the streets of foggy old Londontown, Heather Graham's character would have been kept so busy by those lusty British Johns that she would have been staggering around like John Wayne throughout this film...I think you know what I mean...why was she cast in this movie? For her brilliant acting ability? Oy vey...the production design was fantastic, and Robbie Coltrane was fantastic (as usual, Academy members). BUT COME ON!!! Who couldn't guess Jack's identity? This insipid version was basically set up as a lame Murder She Wrote episode...I was truly waiting for Tom Bosley to show up as a "possible" Jack the Ripper...This movie should have been called Murder, She Ripped...and that final 15 minutes...well, I won't ruin it for you if you haven't seen it, but if you can walk away from this "flick" after that final 15 minutes still saying this movie was good, then YOU are the reason we keep getting movies like this over and over and over and over and over...too bad it was set in 1888...didn't allow for the obligatory car chase too...