Most Americans will be unfamiliar with the late British writer Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Mortdecai novels, on which this Johnny Depp comedy is based; still, no reference point is required to come to the conclusion this is a rotten movie all around. Bonfiglioli’s comic thrillers about an art dealer named Mortdecai and his manservant Jock were published in the Seventies, but this modern-set film lumbers even further back to the Sixties for inspiration. Depp’s Mortdecai borrows freely from Peter Sellers’ self-serious Inspector Clouseau and Mike Myers’ dim-bulb sex magnet Austin Powers but can’t come close to the charisma either men exuded in a single raised eyebrow. He’s a black hole sucking in the superior actors in his orbit like McGregor, Paltrow, Goldblum, all more or less playing straight to his silly, high-kicking, show pony act. Only Bettany, scarred up like a classic Bond baddie even though he’s playing a good guy, the thuggishly devoted Jock, seems to be inhabiting the same movie – a spoof – as Depp.
The plot jets Mortdecai between London, Moscow, and Los Angeles on the trail of a missing Goya painting, and there’s enough potential there to imagine a more fizzily sophisticated something in the hands of a wittier filmmaker (Soderbergh, the Coens, Tony Gilroy). But Eric Aronson’s script is a clunker – no movie needs this many mustache jokes – and it curiously is untouched (at least, according to the credits) by director David Koepp, a sought-after screenwriter of blockbuster entertainments for Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Robert Zemeckis, among others. In between mega-franchise script work, Koepp has written and directed a handful of more modestly budgeted films, including the underrated Ricky Gervais romantic comedy Ghost Town, where he exhibited a far better handle on tone and a tricky leading man. Incidentally, “ghost town” also applied to the theatre I saw Mortdecai in on its opening day. This one’s dead on arrival.
This article appears in January 30 • 2015.
