Starring: Johnny Depp, Michael Rispoli, Aaron Eckhart and Amber Heard
Director: Bruce Robinson
Category: IIB
Based on an early Hunter S. Thompson novel - written nearly a decade before he shook the literary world with his in-your-face 'gonzo journalism' - The Rum Diary revolves around a young American writer going through his professional rite of passage while working as a reporter for a newspaper in Puerto Rico.
While struggling to adjust himself to the decadence and corruption that's rife on the island, Paul Kemp (a proxy for Thompson played by Johnny Depp) is as concerned about finding his own footing in his vocation.
'I've got no voice - I don't know how to write like me,' he says to an acquaintance, as he muses about his inability to develop a signature style. Of course, Thompson did eventually do that - and Kemp also does so in the book. Bruce Robinson's adaptation of the book, however, is devoid of the colour and eccentricity that marked Thompson's life and works.
Produced by Depp - a friend of Thompson's who also played his literary idol in Terry Gilliam's delightful and wackier adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - this film is more like a rose-tinted homage by the actor to his late friend than an attempt to stay true to Thompson's idiosyncrasies.
The film's first 10 minutes might have suggested otherwise. Kemp is seen waking up in a trashed hotel room in San Juan some time in 1960, seriously hung over. He tears open the curtains and is greeted with a scene as surreal as it is grotesque: a plane flies by with a banner celebrating the arrival of the chemical giant Union Carbide to the island. Later, he arrives at the newspaper's office and meets his future editor, Lotterman (Richard Jenkins). He listens to Lotterman rant about the island ('It's a reluctant part of America - England with tropical fruit') and homosexuality ('You are not artistic, are you?') and his gleeful commentary as he watches policemen beat up activists protesting against corporate misdeeds and social injustice.