Who is Charlie Mortdecai? That is the question that Lionsgate wants us all to want to answer. Well he is Johnny Depp's new screen vehicle, in which he careers round this exciting, picaresque caper. Johnny is funny, slapstick, but suave, subtly foolish, selfish but with an underlying Oxbridge sense of fair play which kicks in at a key moment. I won't spoil it. Gwyneth Paltrow is the wife you want to fall in love with all over again, the moustache, that mysterious obstacle to love - will it finally be shaved off? Again I won't spoil the film for you. In the end the moustache is the main star of the film, overshadowing Depp's face, a facially pubic metaphor for the animal nature which fights for survival using cowardice, running away and if cornered, pistols at dawn.
The Old Boy Network (OBN - not to be confused with the Order of the Brown Nose; for our colonial readers this means Public School to Oxbridge to Government or influence) is not amused: what is clearly a fun caper with swipes at the kind of person Depp portrays has been judged as if it was intended as high art.
There is a big difference between English and American rudeness. English rudeness shies away from the crudely rude “motherf******” and towards a more subtle kind. The F word still has the power to shock.
Paul Bettany plays Jock. The books subtly never give his full name, but he gets called Mr Strapp at one point. In Kyril Bonfiglioli's world he doesn't care if you don't get the joke. He wouldn't dream of calling anyone a c*** but might suggest one's suitability as an illustration for a gynaecological textbook.
The striking appearance in the book of Krampf's daughter Georgina with lovingly described pistols and clothes is personified by Olivia Munn whose appearance immediately moves Charlie's brain into his trousers. The real crown jewels in the film are the British actors, Paul Bettany - my favourite thug ever since I saw his frightening performance in Gangster Number One. The Rolls Royce specialist Spinoza is played by Paul Whitehouse with stunning rudeness - straight from the book come a string of filthy invectives, so unstopping and fluent that you feel only admiration for someone who can produce such filth from what is clearly not his native tongue. Many great characters turn up for the party. Jeff Goldblum makes the Krampf character his own. Another British actor who has a great little cameo appearance is Karl Theobald (Martin in Green Wing).
The film embodies a battleground between the British and the American sense of humour - Johnny Depp gives the colonies a chance to laugh at the British aristocracy in the form of the upper class twit; a stereotypical English idiot, so inbred as to be seemingly hopeless at life but who nevertheless triumphs thanks to the OBN and by just not noticing that he has failed, while Paul Bettany and the rest of the Brit cast are quietly getting on with providing jokes which are so subtle you may miss them, but, like a masterpiece bought for a song at an auction are immensely more worthwhile if you manage to acquire them as did Kyril Bonfiglioli when he bought a Tintoretto for a few quid at auction. The Standard was one of Kyril's favourite Indian restaurants in Oxford and appears oddly with the sign upside down in the film as an L.A. hotel. The White Horse pub was sadly lacking.
Thanks to the odd cocktail of British, American and Jewish humour the film has something for all senses of humour including slapstick, subtle insults, schadenfreude and the natural humour that comes from an American Anti-Wooster (Depp) teamed up with an English Jeeves with added violence (Jock / Bettany). Jock seems to positively enjoy being hurt in his master's service.
At this point I have to admit my bias, I am one of Kyril Bonfiglioli's children struggling to understand him years after his death and now faced with a film which has to be viewed as a new art work, produced by a fusion of Anglo-American talent brewed up with the books, Depp's quirkiness, Bettany's friendly but terrifying effectiveness as a thug - British comics providing Brit style humour and L.A. glamour.