Coal-soaked skies and grime-caked slums serve as backdrop to this dark, grisly nineteenth century chase; Johnny Depp, unconventional police detective, in tireless pursuit of Jack the Ripper through Victorian London's back alleys. Frolicking in filth, _From Hell_ takes delight in sharing as much century-old depravity as it can dream up. Unkempt taverns, dimly-lit opium dens, malevolent secret societies, illicit after-hours transactions, morally-dubious medical experiments... we're constantly drenched in dirty material. Which sets quite a mood, fitting for the proximity of one so notorious as Jack, but also straps the viewer with a heavily crowded plot. There's just too much going on, too many surface-scratched subplots that don't amount to much of anything, while the hook (oh yes, we're hunting a faceless mass-murderer) gets bogged down and overlooked, kicked like a tin can down the road.

Depp's role is rather reserved by his usual standards: a hazy, somnambulant drug addict who desperately lopes from one bloody crime scene to the next. While our detective trips, in a series of tonally discordant hallucination scenes that smack of late '90s film trends, he catches foggy premonitions that prod him toward his next big break. It's all rather silly, really, a shoehorned mystical slant that is (somewhat ironically) addressed, scoffed at and discarded in Alan Moore's phone book-sized original graphic novel.

There's something good buried here, between the accurate reproduction of essential locales and the eternally-intriguing subject matter, but it's ultimately left unearthed. The extra-slow second act nearly put me down and out, and I don't think I'd have missed anything if it had.