From Hell

FROM HELL

Rating: B-

It will satisfy Jack the Ripper fans, but it borrows too freely from other films.

A few years back, brothers Albert and Allen Hughes gave us Dead Presidents, about a group of disgruntled Vietnam vets planning an armored car robbery. Aside from the grippingly filmed heist sequence itself, the most remarkable aspect of the movie was its total lack of credibility. It became obvious from watching it that the Hughes brothers knew nothing about the experience of American soldiers in Vietnam, and were just regurgitating the shallow clichés they'd seen in other films. Their entire understanding of their subject was derived from what they'd witnessed in movie theaters. Any of us could make a movie like that.

They've done gone and repeated the same mistake with this latest retelling of the "Jack the Ripper" saga. While I'm not asking for firsthand experience, it might have been nice to give us more than a rehash of the usual shots of sinister figures in top hats and black cloaks skulking along mist-shrouded cobblestone streets. When ol' Jack's menacing shadow falls upon his next victim, the shot is so hackneyed it might as well be of a cowboy riding off into the sunset. When they're not borrowing from the Michael Caine TV movie Jack the Ripper and its predecessors, the brothers are lifting stylistic flourishes from Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. Why did they bother making the film if they had nothing new to bring to it?

Johnny Depp plays Inspector Frederick Abberline, the real-life policeman who led the investigation into the gruesome murders in the London slum of Whitechapel. Although Depp's character has visions of the crimes while in an opium-induced haze, these turn out to be a lot less consequential in the film than the theatrical previews suggest. It's a fortunate thing, too, because most of these visions are as indecipherable as a bad Metallica video. Heather Graham, proving once again that Hollywood prostitutes are the sweetest and prettiest on the planet, plays eventual Ripper victim Mary Jane Kelly. The film takes additional liberties with her character by having her become romantically involved with Depp, since in real life the guy she was shacking up with (and whose baby she was carrying) probably would have objected. Be that as it may, the relationship between Depp and Graham actually works to the film's advantage by increasing the dramatic impact of Depp's hunt for the Ripper. However, it also leads to a sequence strangely reminiscent of yet another Jack the Ripper movie, Time After Time. If these guys didn't spend their every waking moment stealing from other movies, they might actually have had time to think up something original.

Discussing "truth" in the Jack the Ripper tale is a bit like trying to grab hold of a moonbeam, because so much of the legend is quite probably a myth itself. True, there were several hideous murders in London in 1888, and the ongoing events gripped the British populace in a mixture of fear and fascination. But gruesome killings within the slums weren't uncommon, to the point that there is still considerable debate over exactly how many murders were truly the work of "Jack the Ripper" (from four to nine is the usual range quoted, with five being the number most widely accepted). What's more, much of the Ripper mystique, from his famous quote of "I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled," to his cat-and-mouse taunting of police, to even his self-appointed name of "Jack the Ripper," all derive from letters he supposedly sent to the authorities. It spoils a lot of the fun to know that most researchers now dismiss all of these letters as hoaxes. Aside from occasional witness reports of a "well-dressed man," and a cryptic message scrawled in chalk near a murder scene (which may or may not have been written by Jack), there's really little in the case to suggest the murders were anything other than the work of a poor, uneducated sexual deviant. But the public doesn't want to hear this.

So with an open mind, I went into From Hell not knowing which solution to the mystery the Hughes brothers were going to spring on us. It soon became obvious they were relying on the theory of Stephen Knight, whose modestly titled book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution suggests an explanation that's one of the silliest yet ventured. But I suppose, in all fairness, his tale of conspiracy among members of the Royal Family makes interesting cinema, and I can't fault the filmmakers for trying to make their story entertaining. It is also with some irony that I note the film's title originates from a letter "Jack" supposedly sent to George Lusk (the leader of a Whitechapel vigilante group) - a letter Stephen Knight rejects out of hand as a fraud. So they use Knight's theory, but can't resist borrowing part of the mythology from a letter that Knight himself considers baloney. Like I said, grains of salt are in order here. And while you're at it, bring your Cockney-to-English dictionary.