Ripped to shreds
Marcus Berkmann
There are actors who smile, and there are actors who don't smile. Johnny Depp, as a rule, steers well clear of the guffaw and the chuckle, preferring the moody faraway look that may or may not conceal a raging inferno of inner torment. In From Hell, as an Inspector in Victorian London on the trail of Jack the Ripper, he is as mirth-free as ever. Tickle his feet with a feather and he'd only raise an eyebrow. Audiences, though, may be less restrained. Indeed, if you don't laugh out loud at least once, it's probably because you have already left the cinema.
From Hell is that rare beast, the wholly unexpected turkey. So efficient are wordof-mouth and marketing campaigns these days that we generally know beforehand which films are going to rake it in and which are going to disappear from cinemas unnoticed after a couple of miserable weeks. As a purely part-time film critic I am out of the hot rumour loop, but the pre-release press about the film was unusually favourable, and the film did well in the States until all the mad hawkish war movies started coming out. All the indications were that this might be quite an entertaining twist on the old Ripper tale, mainly because it was based on a graphic novel by some hairy man who is widely thought of in graphic novel circles, wherever they may be. As it happens, the twist is quite entertaining, and should make Rippermaniacs foam with pleasure. It's just everything else about the film that's no good.
We begin, though, in Whitechapel of the 1880s, a grimy, overcrowded film set where everyone is either stabbing someone or vomiting or having sex with prostitutes in doorways or having too much to drink in a pub that looks exactly like the bar you've seen in every John Wayne western. 'This is a ghetto story,' according to Albert Hughes, one of the American twins who directed the film, which shows how much he knows about his subject. The five prostitutes killed by the Ripper, in this telling, are firm friends who are all struggling against the poverty and violence that characterise life in modern-day Washington DC (sorry, Victorian London). When one is murdered horribly — Rippermaniacs will know the gory details; fortunately the film shows less than it implies — Inspector Abbeline is called in to investigate. Being Johnny Depp, this is an unusually tortured member of the constabulary, who spends his leisure hours in an opium den reenacting scenes from other Johnny Depp films. Sadly, he has no actual evidence to go on, but he does have a series of convenient drugfuelled visions that point him in the direction of the royal family and a whole host of posh British actors, each of whom is nastier than the last. Blame the Jews! says Ian Richardson in a blatantly villainous set of mutton-chop whiskers. Or blame the working classes, or the immigrants, or the foreigners, or indeed anyone who doesn't normally dress for dinner. But from the first reel we know that it was the upper classes wot did it. All arc monstrous racists, most are freemasons, and one of them is a mass murderer whose identity you will guess roughly an hour before Depp manages to work it out. If Allen and Albert Hughes were not terribly serious filmmakers with an honourable record in documentaries about the American inner cities, they might have a promising future in panto.
And the script! Written by two men who can never have visited Britain in their lives, it assumes that all natives of the island speak in a sort of strangled literary babble, interspersed with risible anachronisms. 'How long have you chased the dragon, Inspector?' asks one character, who may recently have been to LA on holiday. 'You do not fuck with Special Branch,' says Robbie Coltrane. 'They fuck with you.' None of this is helped by Dick Van Depp's awful cockney accent, which undermines his every utterance. During one moment of high drama, he even gives us his Michael Caine impersonation, which may have not been the idea. Heather Graham, as the leader of the prostitutes, is on slightly firmer ground with her glottal stops, but she is far too scrubbed and pretty for the role, as all Hollywood actresses have to be. It is a gravely silly film and an arrogant film, because a little research would have cost so much less than the millions lavished here on costumes, sets and careful recreations of London El. From Hell to the video store: it's not as far as you think.
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