Critics Line Up To Maul Johnny Depp's Mortdecai

Poor Johnny Depp is suffering yet another hammering at the hands of the critics, this time for his latest ‘comedy caper’, ‘Mortdecai’.

The film, which features a sturdy cast including Gwyneth Paltrow, Ewan McGregor, Paul Bettany and Jeff Goldblum, has Depp playing a hapless but debonair, art-dealing rogue on the trail of a stolen painting.

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But it appears that the laughs are a little too few and far between for the vast majority of those paid to give their two cents on such matters.

Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent summarised the movie’s style thusly: “Mortdecai is reminiscent of some of the wildly misfiring comedies that Peter Sellers used to make in the 1960s and 1970s - the worst of the Pink Panther films, or the star-studded fiascoes such as the 1967 Casino Royale.”

Indeed, the Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Dalton appears to agree.

“Mortdecai is an anachronistic mess that never succeeds in re-creating the breezy tone or snappy rhythm of the classic caper movies that it aims to pastiche,” he says.

Pithily, and in a manner which would doubtless infuriate the movie’s screenwriters, the New York Post’s Kyle Smith added: “Mortdecai is mortdifying, a mortdal sin of a movie that’s headed for the cinematic mortduary.”

Ouch.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian describes it as ‘mostly awful’.

“The poster is awful. The premise is awful. To be frank, quite a lot about it is awful,” he writes.

“Depp gamely goes for a mugging, gurning, ’tache-twirling performance. We get some nice gags: there’s one about serving up overripe cheese. But then the whole thing is a bit overripe.”

Not everyone hates it, though, Gary Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times lavishing it with faint praise, writing: “Those who do find their way into this supremely silly action-mystery caper are in for a few grins if not laughs thanks largely to the deft - and daft - performance of Johnny Depp in the title role.”

Meanwhile, Forbes describes it as ‘surprisingly not terrible’.

But languishing currently at a lowly 12% ‘fresh’ rating on reviews aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, ‘Mortdecai’ certainly joins the raft of flops that have littered Depp’s wildly patchy output from the past decade or more.

His turn as Dr. Will Caster in Wally Pfister’s directorial debut ‘Transcendence’ was thoroughly pummelled too, as was – memorably – the catastrophic flop ‘The Lone Ranger’ for Disney, along with the roundly unloved ‘Dark Shadows’.

Whether he can pull back any credibility from forthcoming projects ‘Black Mass’ – in which he plays mobster Whitey Bulger with the help of a bald wig – or the next instalment of the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ franchise, ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’, due out in 2017, remains to be seen.

Image credits: Lionsgate

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