Much talent went into “The Rum Diary”: Hunter S. Thompson wrote the book, Johnny Depp stars and Bruce Robinson, who did “Withnail and I,” directs. So in the true spirit of the ’60s, it was pretty much guaranteed to be a disappointment.
This is a fitfully amusing superhero origin story set in 1960 Puerto Rico, where Thompson’s alter ego, newspaperman Paul Kemp (Thompson’s friend Depp), makes acquaintance with psychedelic drugs, dangerous women and the Lex Luthor-ish countenance of Richard M. Nixon. The superpower Kemp will harness is his writing style, and at the end we are told that he will wind up “one of America’s most revered journalists,” in an example of the unbearable genuflection that set up Thompson’s 2005 self-destruction. (It was a protracted murder-suicide: Thompson had slain his own talent by degrees over the previous 30 years.)
The legend of Thompson is immortal, though, and it’ll fall to each generation to jam him into its own mold. Depp and Robinson’s view is that Thompson was like a mullet: a party in the back but all business upfront.
Mainly he is a liberal crusader — equal parts Bob Dylan and Bob Woodward.
The halo doesn’t sit well on a man of pure anarchy. Thompson was a giddy knife thrower, the Don Rickles of Haight-Ashbury.
Though he was a man of the left, his métier was put-down and hyperbole, not the high-risk exposé. (In “The Rum Diary” he must go on the run because he breaks a confidentiality agreement forced on him by an oily fixer played by Aaron Eckhart.) Such are Thompson’s plotting abilities that here we find he couldn’t even imagine how hard-hitting news stories are made: Paul’s big scoop is that developers are starting a p.r. campaign to back their plan to block off yet more beach from the people with a hotel. This economic model is known as “Puerto Rico.” Paul is also the least-likely, least-experienced, least-reliable p.r. man in San Juan, and yet the Eckhart character recruits him and hands him the keys to a flashy car, along with a wad of cash.
What’s the point of Paul’s outrage? In the climax, he tries to get his busted newspaper to print one more edition to play up his story on the hotel, but as his crusty editor (Richard Jenkins) has already explained to him, nobody cares.
Many of Thompson’s most memorable riffs were just pharmaceutical joyrides that had nothing to do with politics, but putting an acid trip on film defeated Terry Gilliam in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” and it still isn’t a lot of fun to watch others get wasted. If (in Thompson’s words) it’s true that when the going gets weird the weird turn pro, the party scenes here are minor-league. Paul gets drunk and blows flaming gasoline on a cop, he nearly zooms a Corvette into the ocean and (in a completely pointless scene) he meets a hermaphrodite witch doctor.
The glory of HST was his hilarious language, and Depp’s monotone growl is an able steward to Thompson’s free-range disgust, his paranoid ravings, his loathing and/or fear. But a string of colorful word fireworks do not a movie make. Anyway, the film admits Thompson had not yet fully developed his blazing Gonzo panache. (The most successful attempt to put this on-screen still belongs to Bill Murray in 1980’s “Where the Buffalo Roam”). Paul may be played by one of the most charismatic actors alive, but for the most part, he is just another boozy hack.