Review | The Rum Diary

Us Rating: **

Not even a playful Johnny Depp can save this meandering comic adventure (based on a Hunter S. Thompson novel). He plays a hard-living writer who uproots to Puerto Rico in the late 1950s, gets a job at a downtrodden newspaper, then tangles with a businessman (Aaron Eckhart) and his fiancee (Amber Heard). Only some of Depp's capers engage (like the drunken car chase with angry locals). Otherwise, it's all too easy to gaze at the palm trees and the ocean and daydream.