Mortdecai

Year 13, Day 147 - 5/27/21 - Movie #3,852

BEFORE: Johnny Depp carries over from "Nick of Time", and wouldn't you know it, it's Paul Bettany's birthday today.  This was a rare unplanned Birthday SHOUT-out, so best wishes to Mr. Bettany, and he's 50 years old today!  I really should get in the habit of checking the celebrity birthdays more often, but I don't want them to get in the way of my scheduling - this way it's a nice surprise when one happens. It's also the birthday of Johnny Depp's daugther, Lily-Rose, but she's not in any of his films this week. 

I jumped back in time 23 years from "The Professor" to "Nick of Time", and now I'm jumping 20 years forward, from 1995 to 2015 for "Mortdecai".  God help me with this one...

THE PLOT: Juggling angry Russians, the British MI-5 and an international terrorist, debonair art dealer and part-time rogue Charlie Mortdecai races to recover a stolen painting rumored to contain a code that leads to lost gold.  

AFTER: Yeah, this one was about as bad as I thought it was going to be.  The jokes just aren't funny, so can they really be called jokes at that point?  There's a point midway through the film where a bunch of party guests are all vomiting because someone's poisoned the food, and I just wonder if this phenomenon also occured in theaters that were screening this film in 2015.  After about a half hour I had to go get a cup of coffee because I was falling asleep, and turned out to be a very dumb move.  All things considered, I think I would have preferred to take a nap.  

This is Johnny Depp doing his "character work", remember when he used to be a real actor, and he didn't just do characters?  One time, at New York Comic-Con in 2014, I encountered the being I later called the Depp-licant, he was dressed as a composite of Johnny Depp's greatest characters, his costume was part Rango, part Tonto, with the hair of Jack Sparrow, one hand with claws like Barnabas Collins and the other hand was bladed like Edward Scissohands, plus he wore the tinted sunglasses and had a cigarette holder like Raoul Duke. I didn't even notice that his socks and shoes were those worn by the Mad Hatter from "Alice in Wonderland".  I mean, come ON, that's a costume!  I was a little disappointed that Willy Wonka wasn't represented.  My point is, this was a year before "Mortdecai" was released, but I don't think anything from tonight's movie would have made the cut, it's just not on a par with Depp's other character work. 

Mortdecai is a fop, he's not gay but he might as well be, if his wife won't sleep with him, just because he grew a mustache while she was away. (not funny)  Then when he's contacted by agent Martland from MI-5 for help with an art fraud case, his wife is super-attracted to Martland, who's an ex-boyfriend of hers. (also not funny)  His wife sleeps in another room, and gags as if she's violently ill every time she tries to kiss her husband, because of his mustache.  (super not funny).  It was very obvious to me that Mortdecai was some kind of homage to British actor Terry Thomas, who I remember from "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World". 

He's also part of the British aristocracy somehow, which is fading fast. (Like Brexit, nothing funny about this...)  He's forced to auction off one of his paintings and sell his Rolls-Royce to a collector in America. (still nothing funny)  At the same time an art restorer has been murdered (nope, not yet) and it appears there's a lost Goya painting that's somehow resurfaced (still no) and hidden on it are some bank codes that supposedly lead to Nazi gold. (Nazis can be funny, but just not in this case.)  I couldn't really tell if this plot was ripping off "National Treasure" or the "Indiana Jones" movies, because it just wasn't obvious enough, except for the opening sequence that sort of calls to mind the Club Obi-Wan scenes of "Temple of Doom".  

All I really learned was that Johnny Depp should have stuck to real acting, as in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape", "Benny & Joon" and "Donnie Brasco" before taking that left turn at Ed Wood and concentrating on characters.  I can't stand "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" because I just don't understand a single thing about it, it's especially challenging to decipher the dialogue, both Depp's and Benicio Del Toro's.  Mad Hatter, Guy LaPointe, Willy Wonka and Grindelwald, all very inaccessible characters, and now there's Mortdecai, who's equally hard to get a handle on, even though he speaks more clearly than some of Depp's characters. 

Also, Paul Bettany was the best thing about the film, I know he's only been in a couple British crime movies, but I think it's a shame, he should have been in the Guy Ritchie gangster movies all along.  Ewan McGregor's OK, they just didn't give his character very much to do here.  But overall it's a damn shame that anyone spent $60 million making this movie, just think of all the people you could feed with that amount of money, or perhaps make some stride toward curing a disease, just pick one.  This film was nominated for three Golden Raspberry Awards - Worst Actor, Worst Actress and Worst Combo (Johnny Depp and his mustache) and suprisingly, didn't win any of them. 

Also starring Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Paul Bettany (last seen in "The Reckoning"), Jonny Pasvolsky (last seen  in "The Front Runner"), Olivia Munn (last seen in "The Predator"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Michael Culkin (last seen in "The Good Liar"), Ulrich Thomsen (last seen in "The Thing" (2011)), Alec Utgoff (last seen in "San Andreas"), Rob de Groot, Paul Whitehouse (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Norma Atallah (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Michael Byrne (last seen in "Proof of Life"), Austin Lyon (last seen in "Miles Ahead"), Ricky Champ, Nicholas Farrell (last seen in "Legend" (2015)), Junix Inocian.  

RATING: 3 out of 10 auction paddles