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Also showing: From Hell<br></br>Just Visiting<br></br>Cool And Crazy

Ghost train to Hell

Nicholas Barber
Monday 11 February 2002 01:00 GMT
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From Hell is a ripping yarn about Jack the Ripper. It doesn't play as fast and loose with the period as Moulin Rouge did, thank goodness, but the trippy editing and effects aren't aiming at objective authenticity, either. The Hughes Brothers' film is a ghost train ride through a gothic London of flapping ravens, severe monoliths and a blood-red glowering sky.

What raises From Hell above a stylishly lurid slasher movie is its judicious use of its source material. It's based on a scholarly, mystic, 500-page comic strip, scripted by Alan Moore. The screenwriters, Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, have turned this colossal tome into a lean whodunnit, but they deserve credit for filletting the graphic novel without butchering it. The film is specked with Moore's weird allusions and emphases: the way in which the Whitechapel murders helped mould the tabloid press of today; the presence of both the Elephant Man and Buffalo Bill in London at the time; all sorts of creepy historical trivia so mundane and outlandish that it brings the Ripper to life, and leaves you asking yourself if the story's wild conspiracy theory might just be true.

Some of the Ripper's flights of insane verbosity also come from Moore. And this dialogue, chillingly delivered, makes Jack by far the most captivating character in the movie. The above-the-title stars don't fare so well. Johnny Depp's investigating officer is usually in an opium-induced trance, Heather Graham's persecuted prostitute is just a giant pair of beseeching eyes, and both characters are too sketchy for us to care about. Still, Depp and Graham deserve some credit, too. I've heard lots of worse cockney accents from British actors.

In 1993, Jean Reno starred in Les Visiteurs, a French comedy blockbuster about a 12th-century knight who falls through time to the present day. He also stars in Just Visiting, the Americanised remake. Like a zanier Crocodile Dundee, it pits a primitive tough guy against a modern metropolis, and it's full of exchanges along the lines of, "You like to eat hog dogs, huh?" – "I like to eat every kind of dog."

Cool And Crazy is the most unpatronising documentary about a Norwegian fishing village's male-voice choir I've ever seen. Muhammad Ali – The Greatest is a documentary that might just catch out a few unwary cinema-goers who think they're paying to see next week's biopic.

n.barber@independent.co.uk

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