The Rum Diary follows the story of Paul Kemp, played by Johnny Depp. After becoming fed up with America, he flies on down to Puerto Rico to write for a newspaper. After befriending a few oddballs and becoming quite taken with rum, he meets an enterprising businessman (Aaron Eckhart) who has a proposition that could do Kemp a lot of good. But with the rum making every day a little more wacky, it's not long before things start tearing at the seams.
The Rum Diary is quite a drawn out movie. It seems to lazily glide along with no real direction. I guess that's a reflection of the main character, but that's not really what I want to see in a movie. It's just a sequence of scenes in which Johnny Depp plays a drunk guy and gets into mishaps. Don't get me wrong, it's quite entertaining in places, especially in the middle when Kemp and his newspaper friend have some car trouble in the countryside. But at the end of it all the plot just kind of fizzles out, and I was left wondering if there was really much point.
But that doesn't mean The Rum Diary is bad, it just means there isn't a great amount of substance to it. There are some great performances in this movie, especially from Johnny Depp and Michale Rispoli. I was watching it in the early hours of the morning, and while most movies would have me drifting off to sleep at this time, The Rum Diary kept me entertained enough to stay awake until the end. Good effort, but I'm sure there could have been a bit more to it if they tried.
My rating: 3/5
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