Movie Reviews

In The Limehouse Golem, director Juan Carlos Medina and screenwriter Jane Goldman, working off a novel by Peter Ackroyd, take you to London during the Victorian era. Someone is slicing and dicing up people in the city’s seedy Limehouse district and it’s up to rumored-to-be-gay inspector John Kildare (Bill Nighy) and Lizzie Cree (Olivia Cooke), an actress who has been accused of poisoning her playwright husband, to solve the grizzly murders.

Through a series of flashbacks, John gets to hear all about Lizzie’s past and her rise to fame. Why he is so intrigued by her or what he initially thinks her case has anything to do with the recent murders, never really becomes clear. Even John’s partner, George Flood (Daniel Mays), seems to be perplexed about why John keeps going back to talk to the incarcerated Lizzie. And when he isn’t in the prison, John can be found traipsing around London in an effort to rule out possible suspects.

 This movie doesn’t really have a lot going for it. The London Medina shows us looks cliché, Bill Nighy does the same thing he always does but feels out of place here and things never really get exciting… kind of a prerequisite for a movie about a serial killer. Not sure what they were going for with this one, but I’m pretty sure no one involved can be entirely happy about what they ended up with.