There should probably be an option between ``Worth Consuming’’ and ``Not Worth Consuming’’. Maybe ``Ehh’’, which is what this film rates.

Depp is great—I think he was born to be wearing these seventeenth and eighteenth century costumes. I also love Robbie Coltrane, and it’s great to see him, even if his part isn’t that great. The film is based on Alan Moore’s graphic novel, so it has that going for it, and Moore seems to have absorbed all the information about the Ripper killings and assembled it into a fairly believable story, one with certain magical aspects that you’d expect from him.

But the film presents everything in such a flat manner that it’s difficult to really care about anyone—the victims, the killer, Depp’s detective, anyone. The plot moves ahead smoothly, and we are shown various events meant to provide us with the background to understand how the killer is choosing the people he kills and why he kills them in the way he does. But it’s not enough to really allow us to understand the plan. What does the killer hope to obtain? We don’t know, exactly, even after a speech he makes near the end of the film. I imagine that Moore may have filled in the blanks much more completely, but that that information was left out of the film for time or because the film makers believed that it was irrelevant.

The result is a film that looks good, that moves through its story from point A to point B fairly clearly, that answers the how and why on at least one level, but that ultimately falls short of being really informative or interesting.