The Rum Diary (2011) Review

Originally posted on October 29, 2011, on AD Forums. Spoilers are marked in bold.

As most of you probably know about me now, I try to find good in most of the movies I see in theaters. Hell, I found good in The Smurfs, however disheartening that was to me. However, I like waiting for a couple of hours, preferably a few days, to create a coherent picture of what it was about a movie that I liked, disliked, and what could be improved upon. Fortunately, 'The Rum Diary' made my job really, really easy for me by making its central flaw front and center, leaving no room for interpretation and making it easy to see its strengths and weaknesses. Simply stated, the film is a mess. It's a complete, total, unabashedly frustrating, pointless, boring, tedious mess with little to no stakes. I would say it had a profound lack of narrative flow, except that I couldn't detect a narrative buried beneath all of the overwrought drama and surreal but not very entertaining weirdness. This film focuses on a group of characters, namely, Johnny Depp's Kemp, in Puerto Rico. They get drunk a lot. Some shit happens. Not a hell of a lot of it makes sense.

It's hard to imagine how a screenplay like this would've ever been greenlit for a film if Hunter S. Thompson's material wasn't the basis for it. I'm not going to lie - I've never seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I'm not going to try to compare the two. As a stand-alone movie, the screenplay, written by the film's director, Bruce Robinson, is atrocious. As I mentioned in my introduction, there is a profound lack of a narrative; no flow ever gets established in the film because of this lack of anything holding it down. Various characters come in that seem to maybe hold some sort of plot that will anchor the rest of the film - Aaron Eckhart's Sanderson immediately comes to mind - only for these plotlines to flit away, leaving more meandering occurring until the film finally winds down to a bizarre conclusion that left one fellow audience member shouting 'That's it?!' as I left the theater. This is what hurts the film the most. I am not suggesting that I wanted some sort of air-tight, completely easy to predict plotline. I am suggesting that a plotline that stretched from beginning to end, in any fashion at all, would've been helpful.

One could argue that Chenault, and Kemp's infatuation with her, was a central plotline. Yeah, here's the problem with that. Firstly, Amber Heard is a terrible actress. The material here didn't serve anyone well, but the woman has two facial expressions and a perfectly proportioned face, which, apparently, substitutes for talent. She is the wrong actress to take this much heft of the story. Secondly, Kemp loving Chenault is something he seems to remember intermittently, when he isn't busy lighting police officers on fire or wandering around piss-drunk. Thirdly, spoiler the movie cheats us out of something that could be a genuinely great moment - the moment where Kemp and Chenault meet in New York - and informs us, via a text pop-up at the end, that they got married. Really? end spoiler

You could replace 'Chenault' (and yes, that IS someone's first name, and yes, that is ridiculous) with any of the myriad of shaggy dog stories in the film, as they all reach equally unsatisfactory conclusions. It's a shame that there's nothing that coherent happening in this film, because there is some pretty decent acting. Besides Heard, and Johnny Depp doing his Johnny Depp thing (which is getting a little stale), most of the cast is uniformly excellent to serviceable. I have to point out Giovanni Ribisi, playing Moburg, a perpetually drunk and high nutcase whose idea of unwinding involves listening to records of Hitler's speeches and drinking alcohol so disgusting it qualifies as lighter fluid. In a movie that was better tied together, he would be the centerpiece of an amazing supporting cast, and his insanity would buoy the bizarre proceedings. Instead, he gets lost in a movie over-stuffed with random happenings and people just like Moburg, all quirk and no purpose.

As far as the technicals go, this is a very lushly designed movie. Puerto Rico looks immaculate when it has to, dirty when the movie calls for it, and the setting does a good job of presenting such disparate realities simultaneously.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend watching this. There are gems of good performances buried between a terrible screenplay and terrible pacing and terrible direction and meandering everything. It is not a good showcase for Depp, a continuing sign that Amber Heard isn't the darling the media purports her to be, and an ultimately pointless film. It might be good as an anti-alcohol PSA-type film, but, then again, the film is so confusing and lurching that it might drive you to drink anyway.

**/*****