Bill Nighy sherlocks up serial killer caper 'Limehouse Golem'

If "Love, Actually" rock star Bill Nighy would ever be cast in a Sherlock Holmes movie, he'd surely be the affably addled sidekick, Dr. Watson.

Not after this movie.

In the atmospherically gory story "The Limehouse Golem," the British actor plays a serious, introspective Scotland Yard investigator named Inspector John Kildare, a curt and clipped cop called in to capture the titular serial killer on a terror trip through 1880 London.

Kildare presumes he's being set up as a political patsy to protect the Yard's chief investigator, fearful the Limehouse Golem case can't be solved. Whispered rumors suggest Kildare harbors homosexual tendencies, making him even more of an outsider.

An early break in the case occurs when Mrs. Lizzie Cree (a beguiling Olivia Cooke effortlessly looking 14 or 25 depending on the time frame) is arrested on charges of poisoning her playwright husband (Sam Reid). She accuses her husband of being the Limehouse Golem, a skilled butcherer of children, men and women who would make Jack the Ripper look like an underachiever.

Aided by his own Dr. Watson, Constable Flood (Daniel Mays), Kildare takes special care to prove Lizzie right so that she'll be spared the hangman's noose. She grew up a poor orphan, as he did, worked hard, and found employment in the musical comedy theater of a real-life cross-dressing entertainer named Dan Leno (Douglas Booth).

Kildare discovers the Cree and Golem cases frequently overlap, and he has no shortage of suspects for the latter.

Could the Golem be Cree? Booth? Leno's smarmy stage manager, nicknamed "Uncle" (Eddie Marsan)? Perhaps the show's salacious performer Little Victor (Graham Hughes)? Or the steamy, acrobatic performance artist Aveline (Maria Valverde)? How about the real-life Karl Marx (Henry Goodman)?

This movie doesn't give the audience much credit for smarts. Take the blood-inscribed memo found by Kildare, saying, "He who observes spills no less blood than he who inflicts the blow."

"It's a message ..." Kildare dramatically intones to Flood, "to us!"

Gee, ya think?

The ill-conceived gimmick in "The Limehouse Golem" shows us how Kildare imagines suspects actually committing the murders with knives, saws and blunt instruments. (The production's blood squib budget must have been huge.) This mostly amounts to gratuitous time filler for gore fans.

It won't take much time for savvy thriller fans to guess the identity of the Golem by using simple narrative arithmetic. The screenplay, based on Peter Akroyd's novel, clearly won't tip off the killer's identity by suggesting it in Kildare's imaginative flashbacks. Subtract them. So who's left?

Even with a sterling performance by the nimble Nighy, Kildare boasts a far more complex and layered character than Juan Carlos Medina's quick-moving period drama allows.

And the Golem reference? In early Jewish folklore, it's a predecessor of Frankenstein's monster, a being created usually with dirt or mud, and magically brought to life.

The Jewish reference appears to be associating the Golem with terrible acts of carnage. Why employ it so frivolously?

“The Limehouse Golem”

★ ★

Starring: Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke, Sam Reid, Douglas Booth, Eddie Marsan, Daniel Mays

Directed by: Juan Carlos Medina

Other: An RLJ Entertainment release. Not rated; contains crude language, nudity, violence. 105 minutes