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‘Doctor Jekyll’ Review: A Multiple-Personality Mystery That’s Pulled in Too Many Directions
Despite a game performance by Eddie Izzard, Joe Stephenson's update of the Robert Louis Stevenson novella fails to settle on a clear central metaphor.
“Always be two steps ahead,” repeatedly says Rachel Hyde, the famous alter ego of the namesake character in Hammer Studios ’ “ Doctor Jekyll.” The film’s director, Joe Stephenson, and his screenwriter Dan Kelly-Mulhern don’t take her advice, and it’s much to the detriment of their contemporary adaptation of the 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson novella, which can’t decide singularly what Jekyll’s transformation is a metaphor for. The film stars Scott Chambers (an actor in Netflix’s “Malevolent,” and producer of the upcoming “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2”) as Rob Stevenson, a just-released ex-convict whose brother Ewan (Morgan Watkins) secures him a job “providing care” for Dr. Nina Jekyll (Izzard), a pharmaceutical industry visionary convalescing in her gloomy, empty countryside mansion. Rob’s previous work as a caregiver mainly amounts to tending to older inmates while he was in prison, a skill set Nina’s estate manager Sandra Poole (Lindsey Duncan) appropriately identifies as inadequate for her billionaire client.
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