Mortdecai

PREVIOUSLY: SON OF A GUN

Based on the first book in the series by Kyril Bonfiglioli, Mortdecai claims to be an action-comedy about British aristocrat and unscrupulous art dealer, Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp.) He gets swept up as a pawn in an international art theft, pressed into service to recover the painting by MI-5 agent and old school chum Martland (Ewan McGregor,) accompanied by his manservant/thug Jock (Paul Bettany,) and pursued by his wife Johanna (Gwyneth Paltrow.)

Considering this was the number one film I was dreading to get to, I was a bit relieved to discover that it was quite bad, but not as bad as I’d been anticipating for almost two years.

I actually think I hated the book more. As incomprehensible as the caper is in the movie, it still makes more narrative sense. I’m not sure if I could coherently recap the book for you if you put a gun to my head.

Mortdecai is much more of an anti-hero in the book, and vastly more unpleasant as a narrator. He also spends most of his time either inebriated or hungover, and is always a pompous dick. Maybe this was more of a novelty in the early 70s, when it was first released. Reading it for the first time in 2024, I found it incredibly juvenile.

I remember when this movie came out. At one point, I was actually excited for its release. Two decades ago, I was a huge fan of David Koepp’s and Johnny Depp’s previous collaboration, Secret Window. It was a horror-thriller adaptation of a short story by Stephen King, and I was obsessed with it. I haven’t rewatched it for many years now, and I have no plans to do so. I have the sneaking suspicion that a lot of it probably doesn’t hold up as well as I remember. But it was one of the first movies I’d ever seen with a stomach-dropping twist that had been properly set up, and as a child first getting into the horror genre, it blew my tiny mind.

(I do still own Stir of Echoes on DVD and rewatch it pretty regularly. I think that adaptation is better than the source material, and it very much holds up as a ghost story. There are still moments in that movie that chill me to the bone. It kind of got overlooked because it was released the same year The Sixth Sense came out, and I wish it had gotten more attention. I highly recommend giving that David Koepp movie a watch.)

Imagine my innocent delight when I heard that a decade after one of my then-favorite movies, Johnny Depp and David Koepp would finally be teaming up again. My enthusiasm waned considerably when I found out it was some kind of British madcap comedy, which was not even close to a return to the genre I’d been hoping for. And, like many others in 2015, my deeply ingrained belief of Johnny Depp being a good actor had been shaken to its core. When the abysmal reactions of critics and audience members began to trickle in, I no longer felt the need to ever watch this movie. And yet. Another ten years later and here I am, out of a misguided sense of loyalty to another actor, for reasons even I have forgotten. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

This movie came out after the first live-action Alice in Wonderland, after the first post-trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean reboot/cash-grab that I still have not seen, after Dark Shadows, after The Lone Ranger, after Tusk, and after the Into the Woods movie. Woof. I still remember reading an article from Cracked around this time with a section about how some film fans would never accept that “we’ve lost Johnny Depp.” Another decade after that, it appears that grim prediction came true, but probably not in the way the article’s author believed.

After a blossoming early career in indie flicks, a turn as one of Tim Burton’s fixtures, and gaining a diehard fanbase for his portrayal of an addled, crazy-as-a-fox pirate, Johnny Depp was firmly in his ongoing flop era by 2015. We can only speculate that his truly bonkers success as Captain Jack Sparrow broke something in this man’s brain. It turns out all he had to do all along was act like he was on some kind of substance, with the optional occasional moment of lucidity. Have a funny walk, speak with some kind of cartoony affectation, space out on camera, demand at least one memorable costume piece and/or makeup and/or hair choice for marketing purposes. There. I’ve just described ninety-eight percent of Johnny Depp’s post-Pirates of the Caribbean career. He’s just been playing Jack Sparrow over and over again for two decades now, and there are people out there who claim to believe that this man is still a hard-working, original, talented actor.

But these fans also tend to be the same people who believe Johnny Depp isn’t a wife beater, so I take their version of reality with a generous helping of salt.

Let’s get this out of the way: I believe Amber Heard. I did from the start. While I’m encouraged by recent signs of the tide turning back in her favor, it was shocking and traumatizing to see people I knew and trusted in real life turn viciously against her, egged on by some Internet personalities I’d previously followed. It was confusing and distressing, because it was so clear to me from the start that she was not the aggressor. (And while of course men can be and are survivors of domestic abuse, no, I do not buy the “mutual abuse” supposition. If someone hits you nine times and you finally hit them back when they wind up for the tenth swing, you are not participating in “mutual abuse.” That is not a thing, and that is not what that is.) I think the way that court case played out in the United States is a travesty and set a very dangerous precedent, and I can only hope that Depp’s remaining stans who are not bots never find themselves in a position like Amber’s. I can’t imagine coming forward as a survivor of domestic abuse and facing not only doubt and disbelief, but cruel, gleeful mockery on such a massive public scale. Amber Heard is human, like the rest of us, and she was not the mythical “perfect victim.” There is no such thing. (And she should not have had to be in order to merely state she was a survivor of domestic abuse without even publicly naming her abuser, which is what she did, and that was how this all got started in the first place.) I still think she possesses a truly enviable level of strength and resilience, and I wish her nothing but peace and happiness for the rest of her days.

I did, once, consider myself a fan of Johnny Depp and his work. I have not considered myself a fan of his for a very long time.

No one is perfect. By consuming art, you are supporting someone who has, at some point in their lives, done something terrible. We’re all just trying to survive out here, and sometimes we hurt each other. Often we don’t mean to. That doesn’t make the harm we caused the other person to go away. But intent matters. Context matters. We can overlook many of the sins of artists who make things we enjoy, because after all, we’re not perfect either.

We can all come to different conclusions with the same facts, and we all have different standards of who and what we can continue to support. I know people who are queer or who consider themselves allies who still actively engage with Harry Potter. I, personally, have not been able to do so since the creator went off the transphobic deep end. I still love movies starring George C. Scott, even though I know what he did to Ava Gardner. I have a visceral dislike for Marlon Brando and avoid his movies because I know how he treated Rita Moreno and Maria Schneider. We all have our own lines in the sand.

Johnny Depp is one of those lines in the sand for me. Mortdecai is the first movie of his–besides a first-time Platoon watch a few years ago–that I’ve seen in many, many years. I could have happily gone the rest of my life without seeing it. I do not plan to ever watch another movie of his, and certainly not any new releases. He’s had a misanthropic, violent history that his team has been able to keep well-hidden for a long time. He is someone I can’t look at the same way after knowing what I do.

Now, with all that said, let’s talk about the godforsaken movie. Just know that my experience was very heavily colored by all that.

The movie keeps many of the same general plot beats of the book, but it’s also very different. In the book, Mortdecai is unmarried and revels in his bachelordom, and seems to have relatively little sexual interest in women. Just the fact that he has a wife was jarring to me, but not a bad decision, considering book Mortdecai’s deeply off-putting views on women.

The book is almost exclusively a sausagefest. And for all their faults, studio executives tend to like to have one lady in the main cast because women have money and women like to see other women in movies. Whether the woman’s presence in the movie is done well or not is a separate issue. So upon reflection, it wasn’t that surprising to me to find Johanna cut out of whole cloth with her own entire flimsy subplot, and some extra eye candy for the men with Jock’s casual hook-up partners. The movie still has a very weird attitude towards women, but it was still a welcome change from the pure disdain of the book.

Mortdecai’s and Martland’s bizarre frenemy dynamic is pretty poorly handled in the book. In the movie, Martland does not torture Mortdecai and only has a decades-long crush on his wife. Again, this is better.

To the movie’s credit, it is not singularly focused on Mortdecai’s interminable internal narration, nor is it mostly about him and Jock road-tripping through the USA on their own. At least the filmmakers knew how life-sapping that would be as a full-length cinematic experience. I am actually ludicrously grateful that the movie was like, “We know you can’t physically endure an uninterrupted look at Johnny Depp for that long. We’re going to cut away to Gwyneth Paltrow and Ewan McGregor for a minute. Here, see, Mortdecai and Jock simply flew straight to the guy’s house, and we brought back all of the other characters for the climax as a thank-you for making it this far, champ. Focus on literally anyone else. The movie’s almost over.”

I have never been so delighted to find that the last nine. minutes of the runtime are just the end credits. Thank Christ.

Personally, predictably, the highlight for me was Ewan McGregor, stupid hair and all. He and Gwyneth Paltrow had more chemistry in this movie than they did in Emma, and I think that’s very funny.

Martland might not physically torture Mortdecai, but Ewan McGregor does lay into Johnny Depp on more than one occasion in what I can only read as savage glee. Johnny Depp often takes his wacky substance-riddled characters to heart and is known to behave unprofessionally when he can be bothered to show up on set, causing problems for everyone else who expected to work that day. And some of the dialogue from the exasperated authority figure is just too perfect. Please enjoy the following Martland quote:

“The fact that you’re as drunk as a fiddler’s bitch in no way obviates the fact that you very nearly caused an international incident. A man your age has no excuse for looking or behaving like a fugitive from a home for alcoholic music hall artistes.“

Got ‘im. I actually laughed harder at that line than anything else in the movie. I hit the thirty-second rewind button on Tubi twice, and kept laughing over Johnny Depp’s “punchline” in response. It was not nearly as funny as the way Ewan McGregor spits at him that he’s a sloppy, tacky, belligerent drunk who has no business working with serious people.

The only other time I laughed out loud in the entire movie was near the end. Johanna admits to Martland that she’s been flirting with him this whole time because her husband left her behind with no information, so she’s been using Martland to clue her into his whereabouts this entire time. She tells Martland she doesn’t really have feelings for him and she would never leave her husband for him (for some reason.) Somehow, she manages to do this breezily, but still rather gracefully and kindly before sweeping away with Mortdecai.

Martland stands there, looking wistfully after them. His young, eager assistant comes up behind him and gently recites without warning: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’” Martland’s eyes instantly fill with tears, but they don’t fall. He chokes out, “Thank you, Maurice,” before briskly walking away. The delivery on that last line absolutely killed me.

Even in 2015, Johnny Depp had a strengthening track record of being box office poison. David Koepp is still more well-known as a screenwriter than a director, and his strongest directed films had been horror movies, and he didn’t write the screenplay for this movie, and I don’t think he’s well-known at all by the general public. The rest of the supporting cast were relatively big names, but not huge enough names at the time for people to show up specifically for them.

Dark Shadows had already done the “Johnny Depp in a wacky new look at a beloved older property” thing and gotten nothing. My mom has been a ride-or-die fan of the original Dark Shadows for most of her life. When I told her in 2012 that a new Dark Shadows movie had come out, she got excited. Then I told her it was directed by Tim Burton and starred Johnny Depp, and she frowned and said, “Oh.” I didn’t even need to show her one of the bad trailers to let her decide if she wanted to see it. Just, boom, all interest magically gone. And if you somehow manage to alienate my mom from Dark Shadows with nothing but your name, you are box office poison. My dad had the same reaction when he saw the trailer for The Lone Ranger, which was trying for the same thing and had the benefit of being a cultural icon in its heyday.

The Mortdecai books, like Dark Shadows, are a very niche series. They both have cult followings, but even at the height of their popularity, they weren’t that well-known. Mortdecai is even more niche and less known today than Dark Shadows. It’s an extremely vintage, extremely British series. It is frankly bizarre to me that even as a vanity project, all the decision-makers in the room looked at each other and agreed to have a bunch of Americans helm a throwback to a very poorly aged 1970s European farce in the same year the top three grossing movies were The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, and Age of Ultron. Franchise is still king. Nostalgia but not too nostalgia. Big, loud action scenes. Broad, mass appeal targeting American millennials. Comedy is subjective, etc., etc., but even if the comedy was half as clever as it thought it was, this movie still would have been fighting an uphill battle.

As a finished product, it’s easy to see why it was doomed. Johnny Depp mincing about, doing a C-grade Terry Thomas impression, pretending to be an alcoholic British aristocrat and insulting Americans for an hour and a half is more sad than anything. The man is from Kentucky, for Christ sakes.

This is a movie for no one except Johnny Depp, who co-produced it, to congratulate himself at how well he’s learned his one trick. Even removed from everything else going on in his life offscreen at the time, it is a deeply bleak film to sit through.

COMING UP NEXT: LAST DAYS IN THE DESERT