But dramatizing the act of putting words on paper is a lost cause. But a weirdly earnest final note, which doesn't distinguish between Kemp and Thompson, announces that the Puerto Rico sojourn was the beginning of a brilliant career.īad behavior doesn't necessarily lead to good writing, of course. Neither the real estate deal nor the newspaper gig last long.

Also, Sanderson loans him a little red Corvette. Kemp signs on, it seems, mostly so he can see more of Chenault, with whom he's supposedly in love. He recruits Kemp to join a team that plans to develop a nearby island that's pristine - except for the bombs lobbed at it during U.S. Their occasional third roommate (Giovanni Ribisi) is the tale's wildest caricature: a dissolute Hitler fan who trades in '470 proof' alcohol and a new drug so mind-blowing, he says, that the FBI is 'giving it to Communists.'įlirtatious beauty Chenault (Amber Heard) catches Kemp's eye when he visits the beachfront mansion of a local businessman.Ĭhenault lives with smug hustler Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), who extols the immense value of the island's resort-worthy (and tax-free) land. He's stinking drunk before he ever meets his new boss, Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), and is soon living with a photographer (Michael Rispoli) whose passions are boozing and cockfighting. Thompson's on-screen alter ego is Paul Kemp, who arrives in Puerto Rico from New York to take a job at a struggling English-language newspaper. But Thompson's blend of self-indulgence and self-righteousness is hard to transfer from page to screen, and Depp's low-key Thompson impression is emblematic of a movie that too often underplays the absurdities that might enliven it.

He seems a logical choice to direct The Rum Diary, and he hasn't done a bad job. Robinson made the alcohol-soaked Withnail & I, a 1987 cult film that - like Thompson's novel - is semi-autobiographical. The actor helped get the book a publisher, and more than a decade later persuaded retired writer-director Bruce Robinson to adapt it into this film. He discovered Thompson's 1961 novel, then unpublished, while hanging with the writer in preparation for playing him in 1998's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Everyone else will be wondering how 'gonzo' could be so humdrum.ĭepp has been boosting this property a long time. Thompson, and should interest members of either man's cult. The movie is Johnny Depp's latest tribute to his friend and inspiration, journalist Hunter S. Noteworthy for what must be the least psychedelic acid-trip scene ever filmed, The Rum Diary struggles to seem both authentic and outrageous.

Hunter thompson the rum diary