Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

The last Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movie I saw the ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ starring my main man Tony Todd and quite honestly it was one of the worst movies that I had ever seen and seriously caused me to question whether or not we really needed another Dr. Jekyll flick. And I like the whole Dr. Jekyll mythos that Stevenson has created. Then comes this production from north of the border ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, yet another modern day retelling of the classic tale and while this movie is scads better than ‘The Strange Case’, the question remains ‘Do we really need another Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ movie? Based on the results of this one, that answer is still no, we do not.

Our film opens in the streets of ‘Boston’, because this really isn’t looking like any Boston I’ve ever seen, with the red light district action in full effect. Why set the movie in Boston as opposed to wherever it was shot in Canada shot is beyond me, since the setting didn’t play much of a factor in this movie. Unless of course Canada doesn’t have streetwalking whores. Anyway we know that the erudite gentile Dr. Henry Jekyll (Dougray Scott) wouldn’t be cruising for whores to murder so it must be his evil side Mr. Edward Hyde, this time being a fairly identical doppelganger as opposed to some kind of slightly deformed monster man.

The problem in this reality is that there is a serial killer on the loose in the streets of ‘Boston’ and Dr. Jekyll knows full well that his other side is responsible for these murders but what is he to do about it? His attempts at reversing the wacky experiments that have released Hyde have repeatedly failed leaving the good doctor with the only option of turning himself in. To this end he enlists the assistance of lawyer Claire Wheaton (Krista Bridges) for reasons that I’m not quite sure of since any old lawyer could’ve done what he wanted done, but regardless she puts her nose to grindstone going far above and beyond the call of duty to help her client, despite her initial doubts about his fantastical claims.

Now the movie turns into a courtroom drama as Claire works to prevent her client from sucking the needle. I guess they have the death penalty in ‘Massachusetts’. You would think the likelihood of Claire springing her client are rather slim considering her clients confession, the fact that her client has various trinkets of each victim in his possession and the fact her clients DNA is present on every single victim. I’m no lawyer but you would have be a pretty crappy District Attorney to blow this case. Well I’m not going to be the one to spoil it for you folks but even the Los Angeles district attorney’s office thinks these guys suck.

Before ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ made its way to DVD it started out in life as a TV show and it looks very much like one of those Lifetime Network TV shows in how brightly lit and flat everything is. When telling the story of Jekyll and Hyde you would think that it would be a horror movie but this certainly wasn’t that since there wasn’t any tension or fear created in anything that Edward Hyde did. We did see Hyde kill a couple of people, in a completely bloodless TV safe way, but for the most part he was just a supreme asshole instead of a scary monster that you need Edward Hyde to be. And while Dougray Scott played that asshole quite well you still expect a lot more from a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movie.

Krista Bridges lawyer character was a little odd because her character does really strange stuff in this movie that didn’t make a lot of sense. Also, I am unsure if the character actually believed that Edward Hyde and Henry Jekyll were the same people since her defense was that this person who looked just like her client was the killer. So either she was lying to get her client off or she actually believed they were two different people, but then she retrieved the anecdote that my man was working on to cure himself so she must’ve known they were the same person. But would you date a man who has brutally murdered six people, even though he’s told you he was all good now? I know women like bad boys but come on now.

I guess I really don’t see the point of the movie as it adds absolutely nothing to the crowded Jekyll / Hyde movie pile other than turning it into a courtroom drama I guess, and if that was the case it was a bad courtroom drama at that. At least ‘The Strange Case’, as bad as it was, did have unique plot twist of having Tony Todd transform into a seven-foot gorilla. Offensive? Oh God yes… But different. The only thing we have to hang our hat on this version is watching Dougray Scott do a bang up job playing a dick.