| My rating | IMDb | Rotten Tomatoes | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Critics | Audience | Critics | Audience | |
| 2/10 | 27/100 | 5.5/10 | 12% | 31% |
We are in July, but I can affirm that “Mortdecai” is probably one of the worst movies of the year. Of course there are other bad movies and there is still time to a worse one this year, but “Mortdecai” fails across the board: the script, the acting, the sets, etc.
It tells the story of Lord Charlie Mortdecai (an unfunny Johnny Depp), a British art dealer who is asked to help the police, led by Martland (Ewan McGregor) to recover a painting by Goya. In his search, he ends up going to different places, from Russia to L.A., and gets help from his wife Johanna (Gwyneth Paltrow).
The plot is all over the place, with each character with a different personal agenda. What is really clear from the beginning, though, is that Johanna hates Mortdecai’s mustache. She even claims it makes her want to vomit every time he tries to kiss her. And that “joke”, that falls flat, in my opinion, is repeated countless times during the movie, which made me wonder “Why all that fuss about a silly mustache?”.
The cast also includes Paul Bettany (who has been collaborating with Johnny Depp in his worst movies), Olivia Munn and Jeff Goldblum. Again, they were all supposed to be funny, but I didn’t laugh.
As a Johnny Depp admirer, this movie makes me both sad and angry with him. Sad because it is one in a series of bad movies released in the past few years, like “Transcendence”, “Dark Shadows” and “The Tourist” (I didn’t think “Lone Ranger” was that bad). Angry because he was an executive producer in “Mortdecai”, so he probably weighed in most of the decisions made in the movie! Did he really not realize that the movie was not funny at all? We all know he enjoys playing eccentric characters, but his portrait of Mortdecai, unlike his other different characters, is not enjoyable to watch. I do hope he makes up for it in the upcoming movie “Black Mass” (the trailer seems promising).
The rest of the cast didn’t impress me either. Gwyneth Paltrow’s character complained about Mortdecai’s mustache so many times that I stopped paying attention to her at one point. Paul Bettany’s character basically does two things in the movie: replies “yes, Sir” and “no, Sir” to Mortdecai and has affairs with a lot of women.
The director, David Koepp, also disappointed me, after all, he has written good scripts in his career (Jurassic Park; Mission: Impossible; Spider-Man; etc.). Even though he didn’t write “Mortdecai”, I was sure he would see that this script was not good, but, unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
So it’s easy to understand why this movie only made a little over US$ 7 million at the U.S. box office, despite its US$ 60 million budget. It’s not just because it was released during the winter; it’s because it’s not worth facing the cold to watch it.
