‘Doctor Jekyll’ Review: A Multiple-Personality Mystery That’s Pulled in Too Many Directions
variety.comTodd Gilchrist editor “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.
All volunteered options are either obvious or severely undercooked. Though Stephenson offers plenty of suitably spooky imagery, and importantly finds a more-than-game collaborator in Izzard as both the good and evil doctor, “Doctor Jekyll” is meandering and empty, an update with neither enough loyalty to its source material or imagination to make its departures meaningful.
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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