The movie tells the story of an art dealer who was labelled by Arthur Conan Doyle as "the worst man in London" for his corrupt dealings, namely his involvement in blackmailing.
Promising but quite a frustrating exercise of storytelling. Both acting and cinematography is good, yet the story slogs along and is confusing at times. What we see is not a villain in the making but rather a sequence of mundane events, mostly dealing in art, in which the evil is implicit because of the title of the movie rather than because of what happens. Many things are left unexplained, like how with his involvement in radical political causes and terrorist attacks, we are left to wonder what were his motivations and what would he have to gain from it.
Rather than a movie about an evil character, then, we have a rather dull movie about a guy who is somewhat bad but we can't quite understand how. The ending is particularly stupid and is a major disappointment.
I felt like there was a story here to be told, only it wasn't told at all. John Ruskin, a fascinating historical character, is left undefined to the point where his absence wouldn't change anything in the story, Dante Rossetti is nothing more than a drug addict and Lizzie Siddal is just an empty character. Famous characters like Arthur Conan Doyle or William Morris are thrown in just to say one line that adds nothing to the story. A waste of talent, as the actors would be capable of doing better with a better script.
To sum up, there was an interesting story here to be told but neither the director nor the script writer knew what to do with it. Not recommended.
