We need another Jack the Ripper Movie like I need a hole in the head!

Rating: 3/10 (26 June 2005)

Here we go again. Another Jack the Ripper book offering "the final solution" comes out, another costume drama is released utilising its contents.
Johnny Depp and Robbie Coltrane play real life cops Frederick Abberline and George Godley. Some odd accents here: Abberline has a very lower class accent for an 19th century inspector, Sussex man Godley speaks with a Scottish accent, and Long Liz Stride has hyper-sensitive hearing - being able to hear the sound of Bow Bells in her native Sweden.
There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Abberline took laudanum, although many people at the time did.
We have a few sub plots involving a love affair between Abberline and Mary Kelly. We have the royal physician, the Duke of Clarence, the Freemasons.
And what was it all about? Well, the Duke of Clarence married a Catholic girl in a Catholic church, and the girls who are being bumped off were in the church. The royal establishment are quite willing to use murder to cover the whole thing up. Sounds like a great idea, BUT, in those days Catholics had to be married twice: once in the Catholic Church, and again in an Anglican church. Why? Because the Catholic priests were not registered to marry legally; so, in the eyes of the law, a Catholic marriage had no legal standing. So we are talking about a film with a busted plot.
That aside, the film is well shot, well atmospheric, and has appropriate music.
Another problem is that the conditions the girls of Whitechapel are living in are too sanitised. In reality, these folk lived in utter squalor.
How many more films are we going to get about Jack the Ripper?