By Brooke King, Entertainment Editor
Based upon the autobiographical novel by Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary has everything that a Thompson fan would love; binge drinking, LSD induced acid trips, and deranged characters that often land themselves in the most precarious situations.
The Rum Diary follows Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp), an American journalist that has landed himself a dead-end writing job at an English speaking newspaper in 1950s San Juan, Puerto Rico. On his drunken journey, Kemp encounters wacky colleagues, corrupt businessmen and unending nights of drug fueled escapades. While writing for a publication on the brink of collapse, Kemp bonds with booze-loving photographer Sala (Michael Rispoli) and drug-addled columnist Moburg (Giovanni Ribisi) and is soon approached by investment big shot Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), who uses Kemp as a media puppet to front his shady property scheme. However, Kemp has his eyes set on Sanderson’s smoking hot mistress Chenault (Amber Heard) and endless nights of inebriation. With such a prevalence of drugs and alcohol, nothing seems to go as planned on the island and Kemp finds himself stuck in the reality that everything comes at a price.
The Rum Diary isn’t an incomprehensible story, but rather, it is a collection of drug and alcohol fueled misadventures that essentially lead nowhere, much like Thompson’s previous film endeavored movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Fueled by bad decisions and horrible company, Kemp’s long adventure of hallucinations and bottomless bottles of rum lead him to meaningless misadventures that ultimately result in him being hung-over or his life being threatened.
While the focus seems to be more on Depp and his usual low monotone voice that seems to trail as he talks, as well as his bursts of ironic humor, his performance leaves the audience with only a slight grasp on Hunter S. Thompson himself. While Rispoli, Jenkins and Ribisi are surprisingly first-rate in their roles, delivering double entendres and cynicism, Depp leaves the audience wanting more weird from his character. For a Hunter S. Thompson impression, it fell a little short of the crazy brilliance of the author/journalist/eccentric. The film has no real coherent end, which appropriate for a Hunter S. Thompson tribute. And while humor does manage to find its way into the majority of the screenplay, the usual romance is implied, and adventure is experimented with, many will question why there wasn’t more weird in a Hunter S. Thompson inspired film.
