655 – The Rum Diary (**)

They say that The Rum Diary is based on an little-known, eponymous novel by Hunter S. Thompson, but about the only thing that the movie has in common with a Thompson novel is that the protagonist drinks a lot. This is a tepid, sluggish film that isn’t quite the rabble-rousing, iconoclastic story it desperately wants to be. Johnny Depp made a fine Thompson stand-in in the otherwise-disappointing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but here he’s so sedate that he might as well be channeling Judge Reinhold.

Depp plays American journalist Paul Kemp, who’s sent to Puerto Rico to work on a third-rate newspaper in the late 1950s. The paper’s run by the devious Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), who warns Kemp against drinking to excess. Kemp falls in with a kindred spirit in photog Sala (Michael Rispoli) and a necessary damsel-in-distress named Chenault (Amber Heard). He’s quickly recruited by an ex-newspaperman named Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), who wants Kemp to write up glowing brochures for him and his monied pals, who hope to exploit a neighboring island for tourism.

At this point, you may be assuming that the Sanderson and newspaper angles will connect. That’s a reasonable assumption, but the connection is nearly superfluous. It just plain doesn’t matter; we wind up with two storylines that diverge and converge when the plot demands they do so. Kemp and Sala have wild adventures, such as ducking out on paying for a meal when they think they’re going to get killed, but their adventures aren’t anything new, and neither actor rises above the mess to make lemonade out of the sour script.

I waited patiently for Depp to go into Jack Sparrow mode, wherein he just chucks his lines out the window and elevates the proceedings. Didn’t happen. You could have cast Eckhart as the journalist and Depp as the bad guy and it would have made little difference. Speaking of Eckhart, hasn’t he done far too many of these smarmy, elitist roles? We get it, he makes for a good-looking cad.

The movie tracks as if a child wrote it. If you’re looking for some subversion, forget it. Even the ending seems like it’s from a cut-rate, bargain-basement thriller. I haven’t read the novel, but if this is how Thompson’s early work played out it’s a wonder he got anything else published (as it was, it was published late in his career despite being written decades earlier). Every character is written thinner than tissue paper, and all Depp can do is raise an eyebrow or, more likely, a glass. It’s a sad movie that aims low and doesn’t quite reach that pinnacle. It does get some points for pretty scenery, though (such as Amber Heard).

The Rum Diary: **