Mortdecai 2015 comedy starring Johnny Depp and Gwyneth Paltrow

You misspelled it...

Can't tell if really fun or just annoying.

I used to love Johnny Depp, now I just roll my eyes when I see a movie with him in it. I don't blame him for chasing dollars or doing silly ass fun movies, but it isn't something I want to see.

The Rum Diaries was pretty awesome, though.

Depp is the guy who gets those type of roles. Sadly, most of the movies with those roles suck and even Depp on his best day can't change that. For example, Transcendence wasn't as bad but it could have been 10x better. Morgan Freeman doesn't instantly make a movie good either but he's the guy that gets those scientist professor roles.

This just looks bad.

Depp definitely feels miscast here. And moreso, not because he doesn't play this kind of role, but instead because he does it all the time.
Ralph Fiennes as Gustave in the grand budapest works because he's the straight man. Playing a silly character 100% straight faced.
Leslie Nielsen in airplane, and naked guns. Played all serious roles until them. Again, played them straight faced. but by the end of his career, was only doing the spoofs, and was not keeping up the straight man routine, and was not as funny.
the pink panther with peter sellers.

This looks like the pink panther with Steve Martin.

It looks like a wes anderson movie without the whimsy...and joke timing....and camera artistry. At least they got Margot Tennenbaum.

This bombed only slightly less than Lucas' Strange Magic, which completely bombed.

this looks terrible. depp needs to pick better roles so he can rebuild his rep or perhaps go back to acting school. what happened to the guy who made Blow and Finding Neverland? right now he is at eddie murphy Norbit levels of acting.

There are some good lines, there are some good jokes here and there and Paltrow (very sweet on the eye) is surprisingly convincing in the part of the woman in love with his wacky husband. As a whole though this is very poor. 90% of the comedic timing is off (sometime dramatically so), the plot is highly uninteresting and the character is a mess. It seems that even deep into the movie the writers are not sure if Mortdecai is supposed to be stupid, act stupid or just sound stupid as a result the character is mostly annoying. I suspect the source material works better than this movie.

Szlia_sl said:

There are some good lines, there are some good jokes here and there and Paltrow (very sweet on the eye) is surprisingly convincing in the part of the woman in love with his wacky husband. As a whole though this is very poor. 90% of the comedic timing is off (sometime dramatically so), the plot is highly uninteresting and the character is a mess. It seems that even deep into the movie the writers are not sure if Mortdecai is supposed to be stupid, act stupid or just sound stupid as a result the character is mostly annoying. I suspect the source material works better than this movie.

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Holy shit, this movie is the pinnacle of terrible american cinema and you give it a pass for the most part.

Thanks for reminding me to watch Harry Crumb, candy was incredible

Homsar_sl said:

Holy shit, this movie is the pinnacle of terrible american cinema and you give it a pass for the most part.

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There was probably some Korean extras in the background or something.

No, I mean a lot of the jokes fall flat because of poor timing in line delivery or poor editing. An example that springs to mind is when Mortdecai flees on foot at some point and is like 'hahah! I am such a great runner!' then it cuts to the fight with the man servant and then it comes back to Mortdecai exhausted. That's not funny at all. For this to work you need a jump cut. He must abruptly go from bragging to exhausted. There are dozens of things like that in the movie.

An other recent example of poor timing (along with poor writing) is Love Punch. A strange title for a comedy that is consistently lacking in punch and is unfunny the whole way through.




PS: Out of my 59 favorites movies that I saw last year, 18 are from Japan, 11 form the US, 8 from Korea, 4 from France, 3 from China and 2 from Iran (13 others from 13 other countries). Asia is mostly inflated because in 2014 I caught up with a bunch of anime feature films and went to a festival specialized in asian cinema (that accounts for 11 of the 18 japanese films and 5 of the 8 korean films). USA! USA!