Written by Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan) and directed by Janet Meyers (Inventing The Abbotts), The Ripper tells the story of an ambitious working-class detective (Patrick Bergin) assigned by his aristocratic superior (Michael York) to find the man behind the Jack The Ripper murders. Along the way, he falls in love with a spunky prostitute (Gabrielle Anwar), the only woman who can identify the killer. Unlike many films based on the legendary serial killer, The Ripper isn't really a mystery; instead, it's a period drama that views the investigation through the lens of the rampant classism and sexism of the late 19th century. All of which is perfectly admirable, but it doesn't make for scintillating drama. Equally damaging is The Ripper's mixture of heavy-handed political sentiment and detective-movie clichés. There's a certain novelty in seeing renegade-detective themes transported into the past, but when Bergin's superior tells him he's going to throw him off the case if he keeps investigating wealthy and powerful men, it's still a cliché no matter how ornate the period detail might be. Likewise, the film's portrayal of Jack The Ripper as a syphilis-ridden, horse-killing, sexually tormented looney-tune lacks subtlety to a startling degree. But then, just about everything here lacks subtlety: Rodat spends so much time teaching the viewer about the class hypocrisy of late-19th-century England that he discards anything resembling subtext. The Ripper is seldom boring—and it makes a number of valid, albeit obvious, points—but it would have been better had it given its audience enough credit to let it figure things out on its own.