The Rum Diary wanders drunkenly

The Rum Diary (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Bruce Robinson. Starring Johnny Depp, Michael Rispoli, Giovanni Ribisi.

Funny, clever, and hopelessly muddled adaptation of an early Hunter S. Thompson novel.

After moving to Puerto Rico for a bottom-rung job at a dying San Juan newspaper, writer Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) is asked by a shady businessman to help sell an unscrupulous real estate deal to the unknowing public.

Events in The Rum Diary take a backseat to its characters: a group of alcoholic, degenerate, entirely typical newspaper employees. Giovanni Ribisi dives the furthest into his role as a filthy, broken-voiced, Hitler-obsessed reporter named Moberg. But it's Michael Rispoli who is my favorite as Sala, a more subtly deranged photographer with a talent for elevating a bad situation to a catastrophic one. The actor employs a jaded enthusiasm and an unshakeable comfort with his surroundings that pushes the movie's surreal tone to its greatest heights.

Johnny Depp plays his role like someone stepping in to visit from another planet. This is funny, but it's nothing we haven't seen from Depp before. And while there are a few attempts to hide it, it's obvious the character was written to be a fresh-faced young journalist getting his first taste of the real world. However talented Depp might be, he can't disguise the fact that he's nearly 50.

Much of the film follows Kemp and Sanderson around the island as they engage in behavior that deepens the mystery of how anyone made it out of the 1960s alive. The Rum Diary is at its best in these scenes - moments where its characters are set loose and allowed to run with any trouble that comes their way. The film almost works just as a series of vignettes about the adventures of Kemp, Sanderson, and Moberg.

But there is a story, too, and it wanders so much that sometimes one has to wonder if it's been lost entirely. Someone who has read the book might know better than me what Moberg's relevance to the plot is beyond comic relief; or how exactly Kemp's rather tame encounters with corruption transform him from a passive lump into a crusader against injustice; or what the thematic significance of all these rum binges might be - because these sorts of details, if they exist, seem to have been lost somewhere in the translation to the screen.

There is only one drug trip in the film; it seems to be there solely as a reminder of the tenuous connection between this movie and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That and one or two overly slapstick sequences give the sense that the movie is trying a little too hard.

Some of what's in here is deliberately tacky, like Depp's stilted take on his character or the fairy tale-style narration that ends the film. The problem is that a film such as this one that doesn't have its fundamentals in place cannot afford much experimentation. It's sometimes unclear what's a gag and what's an actual failing in the storytelling.

Entertaining but incoherent.

Rated R for rum rage.
3.5 out of 5