Walters cuts a wicked path in 'Ruby' haze

What "The Ruby in the Smoke" has to offer: A fantastically wicked performance by Julie Walters as the villainous Mrs. Holland. With a little black hat that appears to be cemented to her head, and eyes so cold you could get frostbite looking into them, Walters owns this new installment of PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre." When Walters sneers, "I will cut her heart out and dance on it," she's as brittle and sinister as a Victorian crook ever was.

What else "The Ruby in the Smoke" has to offer: Nothing.

This adaptation of the 1985 teen novel by Philip Pullman, which airs tomorrow at 9 p.m. on Channel 2, is a disappointment and unworthy of the fine "Masterpiece Theatre" imprimatur. Set in 1870s England, the movie follows the adventures of Pullman's 16-year-old sleuth, Sally Lockhart (Billie Piper), as she's drawn into the mystery of both her father's death and a massive ruby that has been haunting her dreams. Alas, the viewer isn't drawn into the story so much as left outside it wondering what's going on. As Sally and her friends ricochet from clue to clue, the plot of "The Ruby in the Smoke" seems to evaporate like smoke into thin air.

Part of the problem is that the movie ought to be a miniseries, like "Bleak House." It tries to accomplish too many twists and turns in the course of 90 minutes, and the resulting impression is rushed and nonsensical. Sally gets a warning letter about "The Seven Blessings"; a man at her father's old office drops dead after giving her a secret journal about a massive ruby; the journal is stolen; people mentioned in the journal surface, disappear, resurface; Mrs. Holland is out to kill her; and so on and so forth. The lines between these and the movie's many, many other points are faint to nonexistent.

Ultimately, adding up the clues gathered by Sally and her friends -- including a photographer, his actress sister, and an eager office assistant -- is as shallow and frustrating as working on a cardboard puzzle whose pieces don't quite fit.

And because of the hurried pacing, the characters are left woefully underdeveloped. Piper doesn't have time to make Sally into anything more than a generically spry young heroine, and the rest of the cast members are reduced to playing either "a good guy" or "a bad guy." Only Walters, with admirable concision and a set of bad teeth, manages to squeeze some fun into her time onscreen.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit boston.com/ae/tv/blog.