Mortdecai
Ghastly affair. Running time: 107 minutes. Rated R (profanity, sex jokes, mild violence)
“Mortdecai” is mortdifying, a mortdal sin of a movie that’s headed for the cinematic mortduary.
Bertie Wooster meets Austin Powers in the person of the title character, an English lord played by a simpering, fluttery Johnny Depp, who spends the entire movie begging us to laugh at his mustache.
The buffoonish Lord Charlie Mortdecai is enlisted by a copper (Ewan McGregor) with a crush on the aristo’s wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) to find out what happened to a stolen Goya painting. Mortdecai’s snarling henchman (Paul Bettany) is named Jock Strapp, which is the movie’s idea of a naughty double entendre. “Every man should have a Jock, don’t you think?” muses Mortdecai. Told he is in debt, Mortdecai says, “I had no idea I was so deep in Her Majesty’s hole.” Despite being set in contemporary times, the film seems to hope to be mistaken for the dumbest slapstick sex farce of 1965.
It’s a low bar that towers over “Mortdecai.” The only funny moment is when Mortdecai finds himself in the elevator of a cool Los Angeles hotel and every hipster who boards it is sporting facial hair as twee and unfortunate as Mortdecai’s lip topiary. Every time his wife sees that ’stache, she wretches — call it a running gag.
While Depp ransacks the Jerry Lewis playbook for ideas on funny faces, he (and everyone else) takes turns being shot, run over or beaten. The story (taken from a novel by Kyril Bonfiglioli) skitters uncertainly from London to Moscow to LA as Mortdecai searches for the priceless painting, which for extra intrigue may contain the Swiss bank account number that Hermann Göering scrawled upon it as he was being captured. Naturally.
Director David Koepp evidently has such confidence in the comedy that he considers the haphazard plot to be incidental, but the two elements are both so boring in their incoherence that they amplify each other’s stultifying effects. Amid the random plot turns, the jokes sound like mistranslations of one-liners that were only vaguely funny in some other language: “I eschew discomfort,” “You’re barking up the wrong Englishman,” “You look like you have a vagina on your face.” “Mortdecai” typifies playful English wit in much the same way as Wimbledon is known for its monster truck rallies.
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