- Mortdecai
Last week, when I was holed up with a bad cold, I was looking for some escapist entertainment I could enjoy while under a Nyquil stupor. I have the good fortune to live just a few blocks from a Redbox rental kiosk, so I thought I’d pick up some $1.50-a-night DVDs when I made a run to the supermarket for tissues and soup. Mortdecai is currently the featured new release at Redbox. An image of the title character—a would-be contestant for Monty Python’s Upper-Class Twit of the Year Award, modeled after British comic actor Terry-Thomas and incarnated by Johnny Depp—graces the top of the exterior display, eyes alit and mustache gleaming. In January Mortdecai opened theatrically in the U.S. to poor box office and nearly unanimously negative reviews, but that big, bright image of Depp on the kiosk suggested a film undaunted by that disastrous theatrical run, one that’s still eager to make people laugh. I decided to disregard all the bad reviews and see what it was all about.
I got the impression that someone didn’t want the film to be so laid-back—and that that someone came in after the principal production. Depp’s fast-paced narration feels wedged in, as do some of the lowbrow gags and the unnecessarily complex CGI sequences that appear whenever the characters travel from one city to another. It’s uncomfortable watching the film launch into a sprint after moseying so agreeably, and when Mortdecai tries to reassume its natural gait after a sped-up passage, it hobbles. With all the awkward shifts in pacing and tone, one can easily lose sight of the amusing character comedy about Mortdecai the art dealer (Depp), his intellectually superior wife (Paltrow), and the detective (McGregor) caught in a love-hate relationship with them both. Such is the problem of trying to appeal to sophisticates and knuckleheads one at a time—you always alienate half of your audience.
