Nothing happens until one of them - a Thompson stand-in named Paul Kemp, played by Johnny Depp - sees the other’s tongue start to grow out of his mouth like some tubular pink snake.ĭepp humps and haws, his mannerisms not unlike those he used when playing Thompson in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” a portrayal modeled closely on Thompson himself.
Two journalists are sitting around a derelict San Juan, Puerto Rico, apartment, having just ingested an unknown hallucinogen. Thompson novel, there’s a scene that appears to come straight from the author’s vintage work. It’s not long before he’s snatched up by a wealthy real estate tycoon named Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), and starts to fall in love with his girlfriend, a beautiful blonde named Chenault (Amber Heard).Toward the end of “The Rum Diary,” the film based on the Hunter S. Kemp is only marginally interested and instead embarks on a journey into the seediest, most rum-soaked corners of Puerto Rico with a photographer named Sala (Michael Rispoli). His editor, a stressed out American named Lotterman, assigns him to write horoscopes while ranting endlessly about the big role Kemp will play in saving the struggling San Juan Star. It’s 1960 and Kemp has been hired by Puerto Rico’s only English language newspaper, a fact I know because I’ve read the book, but which the film never gets around to going over. Thompson squint (Kemp was loosely based on The Rum Diary author) and instead of letting us see him stumbling out of his hotel room the film instantly flashes to his first day at work.
Johnny Depp gives the camera his Hunter S. It starts by introducing us to Paul Kemp, an alcoholic holed up in a hotel room, awaiting his breakfast. Here those villainous rich bastards who lack only mustaches for twirling, loom large over a story which seems better suited to something else. The movie writer/director Bruce Robinson made out of Thompson’s work is rooted in a world of cartoonishly evil white people and downtrodden Puerto Ricans, things which were only a sidebar in a book with much loftier aspirations.
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