He's using the same muttery police-squawkbox voice he did in _Fear and Loathing, _along with the Novocained mug and 'You Do the Hokey Pokey' body language.

Thompson, but one reason the present-at-the-creation subtext doesn't work is that Depp plays him as an icon from the start. The obvious acting challenge here is to imagine how he behaved before he knew he was Hunter S. Something about Thompson dulls Depp's astuteness about how personality works. Assuming Depp and not Robinson is responsible for the overall concept, didn't he think twice about tone? You really can't parlay two acts of stale slapstick into a third-act remake of _Out of the Past _combined with the birth of a countercultural legend. Richard Jenkins, who really deserves better, has a one-joke role as a toupee-wearing newspaper editor. Not especially fresh comedy, either, with Michael Rispoli (who gives the most engaging performance here) and Giovanni Ribisi both stuck in _Animal House-_gone-expatroutines as Kemp's down-at-heels sidekicks. Nonetheless, most of The Rum Diary is played as comedy. Griffith's version of _Footloose-_then shows up at Kemp's fleabag apartment the next morning after an implied offscreen gangbang. That's especially true of a grotesque sequence in which Chenault alienates her fiancé by getting down and dirty on the dance floor in a dive packed with dark-skinned men lusting after her twitchy vanilla tush-just what the world needed, D.W.

I know Heard is gorgeous, but asking her to register emotion is like waiting for a teddy bear to tap dance.

That doesn't stop him from having sunglassed goo-goo eyes for Chenault, whose own faintly waxy baby blues unfortunately don't speak goo-goo or any other known facial dialect. But our hero-no slowpoke at catching on that evil's afoot when vulpine capitalists are exchanging smug grins-soon realizes he's being suborned and decides to expose the deal's machinations instead. Sanderson wants Kemp to shill for his scheme to develop a luxury resort and help his fellow entrepreneurs turn the island into a high rollers' paradise. The girl is Amber Heard as Chenault, the blond fiancée of a rapacious businessman named Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart, doing his best with the kind of Snidely Yuplash role he outgrew years ago).

The rum diary fear and loathing