ABOVE: Watch the trailer for Mortdecai.
TORONTO — Johnny Depp is back on the big screen playing the titular role in the comedy Mortdecai.
He’s an unscrupulous art collector with a fancy moustache and a manservant named Jock (Paul Bettany) who is tasked by Insp. Martland (Ewan McGregor) with tracking down a missing Goya.
A bad guy (Jonny Pasvolsky) and a billionaire (Jeff Goldblum) are also anxious to get their hands on the painting, though.
Gwyneth Paltrow shows up as Mortdecai’s moustache-averse estranged wife.
The movie is based on the ’70s novels by Kyril Bonfiglioli and was directed by David Koepp (Jack Ryan: Shawdow Recruit, Men in Black 3).
Will this crime caper hit its mark or will it be the latest Depp flop? Here’s a look at some of the reviews.
Guy Lodge of Variety called Mortdecai “a perky but obstinately unfunny heist caper with a hero irksome enough to make any happily moustachioed man reconsider his life choices.”
Lodge simply didn’t laugh a lot during the movie, which he described as “longer on frippery than quippery.”
He wrote: “There’s a fatal shortage of zingers to supplement its exhausting zaniness. Only particularly dedicated devotees of Johnny Depp’s latter-day strain of mugging — here channeling Austin Powers by way of P.G. Wodehouse — will delight in this expensive-looking oddity.”
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Forbes reviewer Scott Mendelson opined that Mortdecai is “significantly less terrible than expected, to the point where it does indeed reach the level of ‘not bad.'”
Mendelson said the movie is “a farce that plays best as a bawdy little action comedy that is refreshingly pitched squarely at adults.”
But, he added, “Johnny Depp’s lead character, a bumbling clown of a scoundrel, isn’t very funny.”
Mendelson said Charles Mortdecai “painfully unfunny and occasionally grating.”
Mortdecai, he said, “is something of a throwback to the time when a major film could be aggressively silly and occasionally stupid adult entertainment as opposed to aggressively silly and occasionally stupid teen boy-targeted entertainment.”
At The Telegraph, Robbie Collin called Mortdecai Depp’s “worst film since Alice in Wonderland.”
He wrote: “It’s hard to think of a way in which the experience of watching the new Johnny Depp film could be any worse, unless you returned home afterwards to discover that Depp himself had popped round while you were out and set fire to your house.
“Even dedicated fans will find their hearts shrivelling up like week-old party balloons at its all-pervading air of clenched desperation.”
Collin went further, calling the movie “psychotically unfunny” and an early pick as “the worst of 2015.”
Stephen Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter found Mortdecai to be “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.”
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Describing it as a “misfiring action-comedy,” Dalton said the “charmless farce” is “ultimately a frightful, crashing bore.”
At The Wrap, reviewer Alonso Duralde also used the word “misfire.”
He wrote: “Mortdecai is by no means a disaster — the occasional joke lands, and there’s at least some fun to be found in the frenetic farce of all the conspiracies and the running-around.
“Still, I spent most of the movie waiting for it to find its rhythms and set a witty pace for itself that would allow the humour to build and the outrageous situations to pay off grandly.”
Time Out‘sTom Huddleston agreed that Mortdecai is not “a total disaster.”
He noted “Depp may be suffering the most catastrophic career slump since Eddie Murphy said yes to Norbit, but he’s still perfectly watchable.”
Huddleston conceded the script has “a small handful of decent gags” and “just enough pratfalls and wacky cameos to drag us through the boring bits.”
But he was left wondering to whom Mortdecai is targeted.
“It’s not thrilling enough for the multiplex crowd and not funny enough to work as out-and-out comedy,” wrote Huddleston. “The aristocratic in-jokes are sure to alienate US audiences, while Brits will be put off by the sheer relentless fakery of it all.
“It’s hard to escape the suspicion that the only people sure to enjoy Mortdecai are Depp, Paltrow and perhaps Tim Burton and Madonna.”
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