The movie is big on fire-red skies and black clouds, wet cobblestones, flickering gaslight, and cloaked figures moving through the fog. In other words, it revels in exactly the sort of horror-movie clichés that held no interest for Allan Moore or Eddie Campbell. "From Hell" evokes nothing so much as a pair of small boys given the budget to make their own version of the Hammer horror movies they've gorged on. Which would be fine if the result weren't such a brain-dead version of a dark and complex work.

The screenplay, by Rafael Yglesias and Terry Hayes, has chosen to turn the movie into a whodunit, with the Ripper's identity withheld from us until the very end. What this means, of course, is that the novel's most daring material -- about Queen Victoria's complicity in the Ripper killings, and the dark, pagan artifacts dotting London -- is simply jettisoned. What's been substituted is a pathetic little object lesson on prejudice. Abbeline (Johnny Depp), the inspector working the Ripper killings, insists to his superior, Sir Charles Warren (Ian Richardson -- overacting as usual), that the killer must have had an intimate knowledge of anatomy. Warren insists that no educated man would have been capable of such a thing. He says the Ripper must be a Jew or an Indian escaped from a wild west show. Clearly, the Hugheses mean us to see this as the Victorian equivalent of how some minorities today are assumed to be criminals. They're not wrong, but their source goes beyond that easy equivalency.

One critic has already remarked that the butchery done to Moore and Campbell's work is the equivalent of the butchery done to the Ripper's victims. That's a pretty good analogy. Instead of a family man struggling with the corruption of his higher-ups and the temptations of the low life he comes into contact with, Depp's Abbeline has been made a clairvoyant opium addict who sees the crimes in his visions. Depp, the softest spoken, most likable of actors, does just fine suggesting a man who has withdrawn into opium as a means of dulling the pain of losing his wife and son in childbirth. His British accent is uneven but accents are disposable things, the easiest way of confusing technical proficiency with good acting. Most of the three scenes between Depp and Ian Holm, as a respected surgeon whom Abbeline consults on the case, are a relief from the stylistic thrashing about of the rest of the movie; for a few minutes you get to watch two good actors simply responding to each other, with no fuss. (Though no actor could triumph over the whipped-up emoting Holm is eventually called on to do.)

The Hugheses come up with some good effects -- the Ripper simply vanishing into thin air as he leaves the scene of a crime, or the way, when the Ripper's identity is revealed, that his eyes become jet black. (The directors also wreck the effect by repeating it over and over.) With a few exceptions, it's a relief that we don't see the worst of the killings. But I found the "discretion" of those scenes worse than even the grisliest detailing of the killings in the novel. And that's because the movie is nothing but style -- the period recreations and "Se7en"-style shock cuts and montages employing distorted color and grainy film stock.

What's lost is the detailing of the relationships that Moore and Campbell provided. The novel gives a sense of the tangled relationships between the targeted prostitutes and their clients; there is an inextricable mixture of both callousness and care among the women and the men who use them that complicates our responses. The Hugheses have reduced all the interactions to rutting in their immaculately lit back alleys. And they've lost the novel's touching relationship between Abbeline and Mary Kelly (Heather Graham), the prostitute who decides to aid him in his investigation for the sake of a romance that feels like nothing more than a contrivance.

The gaudiness of "From Hell" might make the film effective for some viewers, on its own cheap terms. But the movie is a disastrous example of filmmakers whose reductive sensibility is not up to the density of the work they've undertaken.

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