Johnny Depp once again dons his alter ego as Hunter S. Thompson…oh, wait, I mean he plays Kemp, an alcoholic reporter hoping to find the sweet life working at an English language newspaper in Puerto Rico. Once there he gets embroiled in rum, US business expansion, riots, drugs, a girl, rum, the failure of the newspaper, and more rum.
Verdict
Strictly for the hardcore Johnny Depp fans
This movie doesn’t hold up to any kind of analysis.
Kemp isn’t even a character. He’s a bunch of mannerisms and bad habits wrapped in a cliché. When you are writing, there is a minimum that you must know about each character: The character’s greatest fear and the character’s greatest desire. The more secondary a character is, the sketchier this information can be. Main characters have to have both, fully developed. Kemp has neither.
.jpg?ssl=1 "Amber Heard and Johnny Depp in THE RUM DIARY")
The movie is pretty, and it has a great cast (Michael Rispoli,
Richard Jenkins,
Giovanni Ribisi, Amaury Nolasco, Marshall Bell, and Bill Smitrovich, to name a few), but the writing…
If he gets raging drunk every time he gets a rejection letter for one of his two letters, we get to see and feel his frustration and desperation.
Stumbling around, getting drunk and waving around copies of his two unpublished novels does not impress anyone. Except, apparently, Chenault.
Finally, we have to face the fact that Kemp is a thinly disguised version of Hunter Thompson himself. Thompson was famous for raging at liars, hypocrites, and politicians. When Kemp gets motivated to publish articles taking down Sanderson and the other developers, however, it rings false.
We have no lead-up. He’s never mentioned his growing outrage before that. He’s only barely experienced the wealth gap between islanders and American expatriates. Perhaps the writer/director was trying to avoid rubbing our noses in it. Perhaps the Puerto Rican government restricted how much poverty could be shown.
Why not? The Mexican government famously put all kinds of demands on the filming of The Magnificent Seven.
Thompson’s outrage came from facing what he saw as the facts. Thompson faced the ugly truth of American politics head-on, and tried to get his readers as upset as he was. True outrage comes from facing something outrageous. However, Depp plays Kemp as a puzzled outsider who seems more stable and perceptive when drunk than when sober. He never faces anything.
Kemp’s fourth-act rage is sound and fury, signifying nothing except a complete failure to understand Hunter Thompson or his work.
Gonzo Soapbox
Not because it doesn’t present his novel as a major work of American literature. He had no illusions about that. No, he would have gone gunning for them because A) Thompson gave a shit about the doomed, and this movie all but ignores them; and B) because this movie got made because Johnny Depp as Hunter Thompson made money once before.
Money wasn’t a good enough reason, unless you were giving it to the ACLU or The Innocence Project.
Thanks. Felt good to get that off my chest.
Overall
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a far superior movie. If you need more Hunter Thompson than that, catch Where the Buffalo Roam, with Bill Murray as Hunter Thompson, and not some thinly disguised version of the real thing.
