Love him or hate him, Hunter S. Thompson was a writer who could inspire men to madness, his political manifestos frothing up rage against machines political and economical or, if that wasn't your cup of tea, then at the man himself for daring to write such outrageousness. So really, the most glaring and disappointing thing about the Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary is how utterly toothless the damn thing is. This, despite featuring Thompson disciple Johnny Depp in the lead role, surrounded by a band of degenerates who, like Thompson's best characters, seem to be inching slowly toward a higher awakening via a marathon of debauchery. The movie bears all the hallmarks of a Thompson story but none of his bite, settling instead for some amusing, occasionally hilarious set-pieces that work great separately but not so much as a whole, and some vague fist-shaking at a political regime long since relegated to the history books.
I'll concede, though, that it is entirely possible that that this is exactly the kind of thing that a Thompson fanatic would gobble up and commit to a time capsule with the rest of the good doctor's catalogue. Maybe this is a film that the faithful will see in a different light than a neophyte, and that's fair enough. But as a piece of entertainment, I've gotta say: it's merely decent, and not particularly lasting.
The problem, really, is that the movie is marketing itself as this zany comedy but the bulk of it is Depp, as a journeyman writer named Paul Kemp, knocking back booze and musing existentially about the powers that be. Kemp, a barely-functioning alcoholic and struggling novelist, is hired to freelance for a paper in Puerto Rico and no sooner does he get there than the movie surrounds him with a bunch of characters who are far and away more interesting. Don't get me wrong, it's not that Depp misses the mark. With a cynical core eating away at his prim-and-proper exterior, Kemp seems like a guy being held together by some flimsy set of principles even he doesn't understand. Depp, no stranger to playing burnouts or wackos, gets under his skin effortlessly as a Jekyll-and-Hyde-style combination of the two.
But Kemp doesn't come to life for long stretches at a time; the character is the real wet noodle here, while the newspaper's staff (Richard Jenkins, Michael Rispoli, and Giovanni Ribisi, each more wonderful than the next) is a motley collection of vagrants that, frankly, would be hard for anyone to upstage. (That said, when Kemp does go nuts, the results are usually hysterical.) As Kemp acclimates to the paper and resolves to drink his way through Puerto Rico, he encounters a slick, capitalist type (Aaron Echkart in full skeeze mode) with a knockout girlfriend (a wonderful Amber Heard) and some vague, potentially illegal plan to convert a nearby island into a giant hotel for rich people.
And, really, that's all. Even with a late-game twist, the plot's not much of a pulse-pounder and writer/director Bruce Robinson can't seem to get a good handle on it. But it does help that The Rum Diary is really an actor's movie; since the story is mainly an interior one, Robinson gives his cast free reign and the performances do not disappoint. Depp and Heard make an extraordinarily attractive (if not always immediately compatible) couple, and Ribisi steals every scene he's in as a hopped-up burnout, but the movie is at its best in the scenes between Depp and Rispoli, who make writer/director Bruce Robinson's witty script crackle (there is, as there must always be in a story that bears Thompson's name, a particularly amusing bit of Nixon-bashing).
Thompson, for his part, always seemed like an author whose ideals were at war with themselves. He was awash in cynicism but never seemed to lose hope that someone might prove him wrong, and while you never doubt where he stood on an issue, his writing was as much of a challenge to that effect as it was a critique (his 2005 suicide was a tragedy for many reasons, among them that he never got the chance to weigh in on the Obama presidency). Depp and Rispoli's characters seem like the living embodiments of that duality: Kemp clings precipitously to civilization and optimism, while Rispoli's Bob Salas has plunged headfirst into existential hell and is just trying to make the best of it. The Rum Diary's ending finds some kind of middle ground between the two, with a lingering message that seems to be something along the lines of "People Are OK, But Capitalism Is Bad."
For all its pleasures, a coda like that makes you wish this mercurial movie had a bit more to say.
