He might not have given birth to the 20th century, as is claimed in From Hell’s epigraph (maybe they’re referring to the studio?), but Jack the Ripper did inspire one of the most enduring movie conventions: the serial killer. It’s a genre that has lost a lot of its shock and luster since the German Expressionist days of Pabst’s Pandora’s Box and Lang’s M, and Allen and Albert Hughes don’t do much to restore it. The atmospherics of From Hell come closer to the meretricious murk of Hannibal than the seductive terror of The Silence of the Lambs.

Based on the dense and literate graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, the Hughes brothers’ version is more cartoonish than its source. It captures the inky dread of Campbell’s jarringly composed frames while shunning the light like a Whitechapel rat (I can recall only two scenes shot in daytime, one in a graveyard, one outside an asylum). And its re-creation of 1888 London wavers between Dickens’s Hard Times and the opening panorama of Disney’s Peter Pan. It looks daunting, but the tale that unfolds is as torpid as its dope-smoking hero.

That’s Scotland Yard Inspector Fred Abberline, played by Johnny Depp as a cross if not between Coleridge and Sherlock Holmes, than between his Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the psychic sleuth in TV’s Profiler. The drugs — sometimes he dips into laudanum and absinthe to take the edge off — provide him with visions that help solve crimes, and his opium pipe opens the film (and closes it, as in Sergio Leone’s equally muddled Once upon a Time in America), as we peer into the blackened, cobblestone bowels of the vile slum where Jack’s first victim is brutally butchered. Slapped out of his reverie by fellow bobby Peter Godley (Robbie Coltrane), Fred staggers from one lurid, squalid crime scene to the next and in and out of city morgues, madhouses, and clubby dens of the entitled and haughty in search of the killer — as well as opportunities for the Hughes to indulge in their coagulating imagery.

Could the culprit be one of the Nichols gang, the cutthroat local pimps who’re shaking down the girls of Cleveland Street? The aptly named Ben Kidney (Terence Harvey) of the police department’s new and ruthless special branch? Sir William Gull (Ian Holm), surgeon to Queen Victoria and devoted to the royal family’s protection? Or perhaps even Abberline himself — could he be doing more than just dreaming the grisly details?

That the Hughes brothers focus on the question of whodunit is one of From Hell’s basic problems. The mystery is not who or even why, especially given that the film’s farrago of Masonic conspiracy theory and pre-death-of-Diana royal intrigue comes off as a less lucid version of a History Channel episode. No, the core of the matter is the nature of evil. Moore & Campbell limn an anatomy of Hell, dissecting history and London and the human heart to expose the darkness within. The film, however, cuts only skin deep. Sometimes the Hughes Brothers show the same feel for the urban pulse that they did in Menace II Society and Dead Presidents. But for the most part they’re just tourists — look, there’s the Elephant Man! — stringing their Grand Guignol postcards along a frayed detective yarn and a strained love story.

Oh, that. Heather Graham is in this film too — as potential Ripper victim Mary Kelly, who despite her Irish (or is it cockney?) accent and red wig will never be mistaken for a threepenny upright with the clap. Maybe it’s the perfect teeth. Nonetheless, her cover-girl looks make her an attractive love interest for Depp, whom she uses as a sounding board for her anachronistic feminist politics. To their credit, the Hughes pursue in Hell the analysis of capitalism, sexual exploitation, and patriarchal oppression that they began in their documentary American Pimp. But the graphic violence makes this stand a tad hypocritical. True, they don’t condone eviscerating women, and these scenes flicker by in stroboscopic fragments that are hard to make out, but that should only guarantee more interest in the DVD version of the film.

As for Johnny Depp, after Fear and Loathing and Blow and this, it’s time for him to lay off the drugs, at least on screen. Also, what with Sleepy Hollow and The Ninth Configuration, this is the third time he’s played a detective tracking down the Devil, and so far the most he’s been able to come up with is gaudy set designs. Maybe he should give that pursuit up too before his career goes to hell.

Issue Date: October 18 - 25, 2001