Bad Movies Inspire Great Critics: Mortdecai
Posted on January 24, 2015 at 3:35 pm
Johnny Depp’s “Mortdecai” is sure of a place of dishonor on the end of the year worst lists. Business Insider and Huffington Post have some choice quotes from some of the movie’s best bad reviews, and I’ve found some good ones, too, including:
David Edelstein, New York Magazine
Having combed Roget’s Thesaurus in vain for a suitable adjective to describe the Johnny Depp comedy Mortdecai, I’m forced to say it’s just … bad…Depp is very, very bad. Watching his first scene, a bad echo of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I thought he’d finally moved from emulating late (insane) Brando to late, slumming Peter Sellers and would spend the rest of movie swapping out wigs and accents. It quickly became clear that his bad, gap-toothed Terry-Thomas imitation (with extra eyebrow action) would be all she wrote. The badness settled over the audience like nuclear ash.
Depp’s grating, bug-eyed performance in this strenuously unfunny film may go down as a kind of psychotic break in his overacting career.
Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph
It’s hard to think of a way in which the experience of watching the new Johnny Depp film could be any worse, unless you returned home afterwards to discover that Depp himself had popped round while you were out and set fire to your house. This is comfortably the actor’s worst film since Alice in Wonderland, and even dedicated fans will find their hearts shrivelling up like week-old party balloons at its all-pervading air of clenched desperation.
Steven Holden, The New York Times
hat a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.
onger on frippery than quippery: There’s a fatal shortage of zingers to supplement its exhausting zaniness.