Mortdecai appears to be designed to be a throwback to 60s caper films. Its approach to accomplishing that, however, is questionable at best. Rather than make a film set in an earlier decade, or modernizing elements of the genre to fit the 21st century, it instead crafts a character that just doesn’t fit in these modern times. It never feels natural, the setting clashing with the sensibilities the film wishes to emulate.
Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp) is an aristocratic underground art dealer who has recently found himself in dire financial straits. His old Oxford classmate Agent Martland (Ewan McGregor) calls him in to consult on the murder of an art restorer and the subsequent theft of a Goya painting. Mortdecai, along with his faithful manservant Jock (Paul Bettany), goes on the hunt through the art underworld to find the location of the painting. Unfortunately for him, everybody seems to think that he already has it.
What follows is a pretty shaggy tale that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense in the end. One should probably note that the novel from which this movie is based was written in 1973. Though the film is set in the present, its sensibilities lie in the earlier decade. Mortdecai and his compatriots are men and women out of time, the movie paying little care to the mores of the 21st century. This is all mildly charming, but it only goes so far. The movie doesn’t really manage to mine much comedy from this disparity. It mostly seems to disregard the fact that these characters are in the modern world, willfully ignoring the state of human interaction in modern times.
And so there is a parade of foreign villains with thick accents. There is a woman described mainly as a nymphomaniac. And entire scenes are dedicated to Mortdecai complaining about how things aren’t really suited to him, like the design of the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles. It gets pretty tiresome; especially since this all comes at the expense of the plot. It rarely feels like the story is moving forward. The film spins its wheels as it keeps its attention on minor matters, like the fact that Mortdecai’s wife doesn’t like his moustache, or the protagonist’s dislike of America. It throws in a bunch of developments at the end that never really comes together logically.
Johnny Depp is tasked with hiding behind another cartoonish character. Mortdecai is the kind of character that someone like Peter Sellers would have played back in the 60s. And while Depp fancies himself a chameleon, he doesn’t quite have the ability to really disappear into his characters anymore. Mortdecai feels like a costume more than anything else. His co-stars, which include the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Bettany and Ewan McGregor, all seem to be game. But there isn’t a lot of meat to those roles.
Mortdecai ends up feeling like a bit of a chore. It’s all supposed to be good fun, but the film never really seems to get a handle on its own humor. For the most part, it ends up being a vehicle for yet another outsized Johnny Depp performance, just another chance for the actor to play dress-up and have a funny accent. The movie built around this performance feels terribly undercooked. Perhaps Mortdecai was never really meant for this century. The film might have benefitted from an actual period setting, where the protagonist’s actions wouldn’t feel so terribly out of place.
My Rating:
