Mortdecai – Richards Reckons Review

Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp) is a character that will be studied for a long, long time. His every move, however minimal, will the analysed; from the way he delivers the dialogue, to even the way he breathes and traverses the space around him. Every machination to his existence will be under the microscope. Why, I hear you ask?

Because Charlie Mortdecai is the definition of anti-comedy.

Everything he does is so disastrously unfunny that it’s actually, in a way, fascinating. His character has absolutely no redeeming qualities of any kind and is essentially skin deep; he is nothing but a moustache and a horrendously over-boiled accent that grates on you more than a, er, cheese grater. He’s also so zany and so off the wall that it becomes irritating – a quality that Johnny Depp was remarkably good at fails miserably here, to the point that you wish the hitmen in the opening scene had actually followed through with their threat to save the rest of the movie from ever happening.

Anyway, the rest of it – Mortdecai tells the story of Charlie Mortdecai, an English arts dealer who does a bit of black market naughtiness as and when it suits him. He is married to Joanna (Gwyneth Paltrow), who gags at his moustache and is mostly there for that sole purpose, and as a quasi-love interest. A woman is restoring a painting but gets shot while doing so, and Inspector Martland (Ewan McGregor) wants to know why – he enlists the help of Mortdecai and his manservant Jock Strapp (Paul Bettany) to track the painting down. There’s also some stuff about Russian gangsters that crops up occasionally too. That’s about it, really – the rest of it is just excuses for Mortdecai to turn up somewhere, dick about and then leave again.

It’s very rare that I see a film and not laugh once, but this makes an exception. Through its writing that is trying to hard to pick up an “ooh matron!” vibe, it tries so so hard but the jokes and innuendo (which normally I find quite amusing) just fall to the floor like a sack of unfunny potatoes. It wasn’t just me either – the screen I was in was half full (feeling optimistic, clearly) and I think there would have been more laughs if we were just shown a live feed of a drain for 90 minutes. Johnny Depp is by far the worse offender here, but the others too just aren’t funny at all – which it pains me to say as I actually quite like all the actors in it, ordinarily.

Mortdecai ultimately is a black hole of comedy, joy and entertainment. It sucks it all out of you like a big Dementor’s kiss from the screen and leaves you desperate for it to be over so you can leave and forget any of it ever happened – and I’m sure that everybody involved with the movie feels exactly the same way…

22 Jump Street – Richards Reckons Review

Sticking to this form I’ve recently developed of kicking reviews off with screenshots of stars in films with great moustaches, here’s the wonderful Nick Offerman and his infamous lip decoration.

Beautiful.

22 Jump Street is the sequel, funnily enough, to 21 Jump Street, the reboot/sequel to the 80s TV series about cops going undercover and infiltrating a high school to bust drug dealers – think Waterloo Road meets The Sweeney, but American and less bad. Jenko (played by Channing “All Over Your” Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah “The Goldfish Eater” Hill) do a dreadful job of trying to foil a shady dealing at the docks, allowing ne’er-do-well Ghost to escape. Nick Offerman’s ultra-meta Captain and Ice Cube then decide that they need to do exactly the same thing again, except this time with a bigger budget (“double the budget, double the success, right?”) and in college because, and I believe this is verbatim, “yo’ ass look like you about fiddy”.

Phil Lord and Chris Miller, helmers of the beloved Lego Movie and Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, direct this sequel and are fast becoming one of my favourite directorial teams (in fact, I was rooting for them to take over directing Ant-Man in Edgar Wright’s absence, but that’s a different story). They bring a charm and gleeful self-awareness to their work which adds another layer of fun to the film, like a comedy cake. In areas, scenes move incredibly quickly on near cartoonish levels (not surprising given their background in animation), and while 22 Jump Street isn’t as absolutely bursting to the seams with gags and jokes as its younger brother, there are still solid laughs aplenty.

Hill and Tatum’s chemistry is a key ingredient of this cake (this metaphor is making me hungry…). The two characters are a Yin and Yang (the starting image of the film almost spells this out for you) but have a relationship that freely dances over the line between brotherly and homoerotic – a la Hot Fuzz, or any other buddy cop movie ever. And you really feel for their relationship too – even though you know that everything will be fine, you get a real pang of gloom when they are apart and when they fight it’s like watching two of your best buds fighting.

22 Jump Street is at its best when it is making self-aware jibes at itself, the industry and its stars – and there are a lot of these jibes too. I absolutely love a good meta-joke (it’s why Deadpool is one of my favourite characters in anything ever), and there are lots of these in 22JS – including winks at the careers of Channing Tatum (a cheeky poke at one man defending the White House alone) and Ice Cube (there’s a reference to a certain album title that seemingly only I laughed at – perhaps for the first time in my life I was the most “G” person in the room…). Ice Cube is a force-of-nature style highlight too, stealing almost every scene he’s in and chewing the scenery right up (I’ve never understood that phrase, but there is one scene in which he does an awful lot of angry chewing, so I’ll use it).

The action sequences are pretty paint-by-numbers, but it’s not really the action you’re looking for – it’s the gags that are peppered over them. Some may complain that it almost exactly the same as the first one, but they make so many references to the fact that the know it’s exactly the same that it shouldn’t appear accidental – it riffs on this near constantly. If I was to have a problem with it, I would say that we see more of Schmidt than Jenko, and it would be nice for Channing Tatum to have more of a chance to prove how surprisingly capable he is with comedy. Jonah Hill contributed to the script so it is natural he would give himself a lot, but more Channing (the name rather than the verb) would’ve probably made the scales a bit more equal. I don’t think I laughed perhaps as much as I did when seeing 21 Jump Street, but it’s still consistently funny and surprising, with, on the whole, jokes that are more hits than misses. It also has one of the greatest credits sequences I have seen in a long time, which I do not want to spoil as it will puncture and deflate the surprise a tad. But if you want an enjoyable, entertaining enough couple of hours, jump at the chance (sorry) to see 22 Jump Street.