October 19, 2001 | Sherlock Holmes defeated him in two different films – A Study in Terror (1965) and Murder By Decree (1979) – and no less a luminary than H.G. Welles cleaned his clock in Time After Time (1979). But never mind: Jack the Ripper remains alive and seriously unwell, ready once again to cut a bloody swath across the screen in From Hell, a visually striking and sporadically potent thriller based on a popular graphic novel and directed by Allen and Albert Hughes.

No, that’s not a typo: The auteurs of this creepy period piece are the very same African-American siblings who gave us Menace II Society and Dead Presidents, two in-your-face contemporary dramas about bleak life and sudden death in the inner-city hood. With equal measures of audacity and authority, they have jumped back in time to a similarly violent locale, the mean streets of London’s notorious Whitechapel District, circa 1888, to offer a revisionist view of the fiend widely recognized as the world’s first serial killer. The characters are white, which is a first for the Hughes brothers. But the mood is as dark as the dead-end despair that predominated in their earlier movies.

Johnny Depp uses a show-offy but suitable East Ender accent to play Inspector Fred Abberline, a sort of Victorian-era Columbo who periodically stokes his gray cells by sipping absinthe -- the same stuff guzzled by the bohos in Moulin Rouge! – or “riding the dragon” (i.e., smoking opium). With the benefit of these stimulants, Abberline is able to “see” murders before they happen, a phenomenon accepted with equal measures of indulgence and suspicion by his snooty superior, Sir Charles Warren (Ian Richardson), and his Shakespeare-quoting sidekick, Sgt. Peter Godley (a priceless Robbie Coltrane).

Unfortunately, Abberline’s second sight is inadequately sharp to expedite his pursuit of Jack the Ripper, the demonic madman who carves unfortunate prostitutes into revoltingly bloody messes. (The violence in From Hell is, considering what it could have been, relatively restrained. But it may give you nightmares anyway, so be forewarned.) Jack’s fearsome handiwork panics the entire city, turning frightened mobs against likely suspects -– Jews, foreigners and other socially undesirables -– and generating the kind of sensationalist bad press that can make a police department look bad. And so, even though the victims are “just” prostitutes, Abberline is charged with speedily bringing the killer to justice.

Trouble is, some of the same people who are giving him orders are also plotting to make sure that, even with a few stiff drinks and long puffs to enhance his senses, the inspector fails to stop the madness before it serves its purpose.

From Hell isn’t a mystery, strictly speaking, since just about everything but the killer’s true identity –- the motives for the murders, the full extent of the conspiracy behind the crimes, all of the really important stuff -- can be deduced at least an hour or so before Abberline adds everything together. Working from a script by Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, the Hughes brothers attempt to muddy the waters by shifting attention toward a rather-too-obvious red herring, and introduce some unnecessary but relatively painless romantic interest by linking Abberline with an Irish-born prostitute and potential victim, Mary Kelly, played with disarming sincerity and an uncertain accent by Heather Graham.

The plot has a couple of gaping holes that can’t be discussed without letting a few cats out of the bag. Suffice it to say that, narratively speaking, From Hell skates over some awfully thin ice with a handful of genuinely clever twists and droll touches. The performances are a big help. In addition to Coltrane and Richardson, the first-rate supporting cast includes Ian Holm as a gentlemanly physician to the royal family and Katrin Cartlidge as a most unladylike Whitechapel regular.

Depp is getting to be a spot-on master at playing eccentric leads in period detective stories; after this film and Sleepy Hollow, I’m curious to see if he could pull off a star turn as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s superstar sleuth. By the way: Much like Sleepy Hollow, From Hell will delight movie buffs with key elements of its lavish production design -– gas-lighted boulevards, fog-shrouded alleyways, surgeries where patients endure the worst kinds of malpractice -– that recall Hammer horror flicks of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The atmosphere is thick enough to cut with a knife. Which, when you think about it, is as it should be.