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JUST when you think you have had enough of Victorian serial killers, Bill Nighy pops up in another ripping yarn.
In the entertaining but overstuffed adaptation of a Peter Ackroyd novel, he plays a dapper detective tasked with tracking down a Jack the Ripper-style killer in London’s East End.
Nighy had never played a detective before and took the part after his friend Alan Rickman was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Yet his world-weary schtick feels tailormade for careworn sleuth John Kildare.
The case of The Golem, who named himself after a monster from Jewish folklore, has been a tough nut to crack and Scotland Yard needs someone to blame.
Outsider Kildare, who is “not the marrying kind”, is an obvious scapegoat.
But there’s a flipside to this set-up – he has nothing to lose. To his bosses’ dismay, Kildare starts meddling in a closed case.
The husband of music hall star “Little Lizzie” (Olivia Cooke) has been poisoned and the police have her down as the killer.
With her show trial just days away, Kildare begins to suspect she is also the victim of a set-up. Evidence suggests her husband was The Golem.
As Kildare interviews Lizzie in her cell, another tale begins to crash in. Before she became Little Lizzie, she was slum girl Elizabeth who forced her way into the theatrical life after befriending comic/singer/drag act Dan Leno (Douglas Booth).
Cooke soon begins to eclipse Nighy as the film’s lead.
But this is a lot of plot to cram into a 105-minute film and at times you wonder if Ackroyd’s novel would have made a better TV mini-series.
There’s a TV feel to the production design too. The music hall scenes were shot in a studio, with cobbled streets in West Yorkshire doubling for the Victorian East End.
You expect to see more of London for the price of a cinema ticket.