Oh not another RIPPER YARN
With a familiar plot and an underwhelming cast, this so-so thriller gets off to an unpromising start – thankfully, there is a twist in the tale
The generally rather wonderful Bill Nighy may be many things but he is surely nobody’s idea of a Victorian-era Scotland Yard detective investigating a series of Jack the Ripper-style murders in London. Mind you, the same could be said of the late, great Alan Rickman, who was originally cast to play the central role of Inspector John Kildare before ill health tragically intervened.
Both men can tilt a hat at a jaunty angle and both bring (or sadly, in Rickman’s case, brought) a mild sexual ambiguity to nearly every role – Kildare’s police career has supposedly been hampered by dark rumours that ‘he’s not the marrying kind’ – but that’s surely missing the main point. Rickman would have been 69 when he accepted the role in 2015, while Nighy is barely four years younger. The Love Actually star may be beautifully preserved but that still makes him unlikely casting as a detective apparently taking on his first murder case.
That turns out to be one of the problems with this so-so adaptation of Peter Ackroyd’s 1994 novel Dan Leno And The Limehouse
Golem. The casting is a bit off right across the board, with almost no one quite convincing in their role and certainly no one grabbing the opportunity to enhance their career.
The one possible exception is young Douglas Booth – still perhaps best known as Pip from TV’s last adaptation of Great Expectations – who makes a decent fist of music-hall performer and impresario Dan Leno, one of several real-life characters woven – not always successfully – into Ackroyd’s already complex fiction.
But there are other problems too, not least being the sheer ubiquity of the Jack the Ripper story or, in this case, Ripper-like stories. In recent years we’ve had umpteen series of Ripper Street on TV, while Johnny Depp has had a couple of goes at this dark, unfailingly fog-bound and generally gothic-flavoured genre (Sweeney Todd in 2007 and, six years earlier, From Hell, where he played a Scotland Yard detective investigating the Ripper murders themselves).
The only real difference is that Depp’s Inspector Abbeline had psychic powers while Nighy’s actorly Kildare has to rely on a fluency in
Latin and his expertise at getting around London.
You do wonder, too, whether the choice of a relatively inexperienced American director, Juan Carlos Medina, was the right one. He doesn’t do much that is actually wrong – nor does he do
‘The bitty structure never really flows and the wordy dialogue fails to convince’
enough to distinguish his offering from the many others that have gone before. Yes, he does a fine job of concealing an excellent late twist but, until that very welcome point, it needed a stronger creative vision. Alas, this doesn’t get one. Set eight years before the Ripper murders, Kildare is sent in to east London’s Limehouse district to investigate a grisly series of killings that have no pattern. With the frenzied ferocity of the attacks about the only thing they have in common, it’s small wonder that the local community is blaming the deaths on something non-human – the ‘golem’ of Jewish folklore. Supposedly, this is Kildare’s big moment but his Scotland Yard colleagues don’t expect him to solve the murders; they just want him to take the blame when he can’t.
But while his investigation deepens, another story is unfolding, this time in a Limehouse music hall where Lizzie (Olivia Cooke), a poor, abused but still resourceful young woman, is taken on as a dresser for Dan Leno’s popular variety company. But will she remain content with this behind-the-scenes role? The hugely experienced Jane Goldman, whose credits include Stardust and The Woman In Black, provides the screenplay but the bitty structure never really flows and the wordy dialogue fails to convince. I’m not sure keeping Karl Marx as a suspect was a good idea either – it may be in the book but on screen it teeters towards the silly. But as summer draws to a close, at least it’s something different, the twists and turns of the last lap are genuinely good and the final dedication to Rickman distinctly poignant.