Starring: Johnny Depp, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ewan McGregor, Paul Bettany, Olivia Munn, Jeff Goldblum Director: David Koepp

    IT is easy to see why Johnny Depp was drawn to the mischievously slippery, louche and charming fictional character of Charlie Mortdecai. And while he clearly has a great deal of fun playing the sly moustache-twirling British aristocrat, the film just never quite works as it aims for knowing slapstick but ends up feeling like an extended skit with the joke outstaying its welcome.

    This is a massive shame, because Kyril Bonfiglioli’s trilogy of Mortdecai books — “Don’t Point That Thing at Me,” “Something Nasty in the Woodshed” and “After Your With the Pistol” — are wonderfully surreal and engagingly dark stories that have long deserved to be brought to the big screen. But with Depp’s focus on false teeth (to gain a Terry-Thomas style gap); luxuriant moustache and broad comedy stylings, this Mortdecai feels more like a modern-day relative of Captain Jack Sparrow than the deviously and deliciously amoral character he is in print.

    Director David Koepp (who made “Ghost Town” and “Premium Rush” and who worked with Depp on “Secret Window”) aims to keep the pace up and the storyline shifts around Oxford and London before shifting to Los Angeles where the action level racks up, and then back to jolly old England for a caper style climax. It is shot in a glossy and breezy style but someone the combination of Depp’s play-for-laughs performance and screenwriter Eric Aronson’s rather lightweight script all but tones down the more glorious excesses of Mortdecai and his loyal manservant Jock (Paul Bettany).

    It has been pointed out in various book reviews over the years that Mortdecai and Jock are an amoral variation on PG Wodehouse’s classic Wooster and Jeeves characters. This comes — in the books — from the manservant and master combination along with Mortdecai’s love of bizarre cocktails, fine foods and alcohol of all kinds, but in the film it is more about Depp’s appearance and environment — beautifully coiffured, elegantly and ornately dressed and living in a stately home — rather than the wit and bumbling batter that defines the Jeeves and Wooster stories.

    Mortdecai is a bon vivant, man about town and occasional dodgy art dealer, permanently in money troubles as he tries to maintain the Mortdecai estate without having to resort to his wife Johanna (Gwyneth Paltrow) selling off her own possession to help pay the bills. When she returns to find him sporting a moustache that she finds physically repellent (one of the few good jokes in the film) he is soon packed off to the spare room.

    Before long he finds himself asked to assist MI5 in tracking down a lost Goya painting that happens to be the key to claiming lost Nazi millions. The interweaving plot sees Mortdecai (and secretly Johanna) investigating what happened to the Goya, get involved with both a Russian gangster and a L.A. millionaire, fight off a terrorist who wants to get the Nazi millions to fund his dastardly deeds and finally trying to rig an auction in his favor.

    The fact that Joel Harlow (Depp’s make-up artist since the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” film) and costume designer Ruth Myers are so important to the film speaks volumes about the importance of look of the film and more importantly the “style” of Mortdecai’s moustache. Depp’s Mortdecai is a real eccentric peacock of a man and very much core of the film as he flits from one dangerous and disastrous moment to the next, but there is a sense that his eccentricity dominates just too much and makes the film all about the flourish and not the content.

    Depp is known to be a fan of British comedy series “The Fast Show,” and there are moments (especially a gag scene involving Mortdecai with a shotgun out at a grouse shoot) that feel just like scenes from that show. The film also has “The Fast Show” performer Paul Whitehouse starring as Mortdecai’s dodgy car restorer Spinoza.

    Alongside Depp, Paltrow has the right amount of glacial charm to convince as the equally aristocratic Johanna, while Paul Bettany is nicely cast as the thuggish woman-magnet Jock.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen.

    (SD-Agencies)