Mortdecai (2015)

Mortdecai arrives with the confidence of a man who has just spent a great deal of money on a mustache and expects the world to applaud. Johnny Depp plays Lord Charlie Mortdecai, an art dealer and swindler of crushing debt and negligible competence, chasing a stolen Goya that supposedly conceals the location of hidden Nazi gold. David Koepp directs this 2015 adaptation of Kyril Bonfiglioli's novel with the grim determination of someone fulfilling a contractual obligation. The film grossed $47.3 million against a $60 million budget. The arithmetic speaks for itself.

From a cultural standpoint, the film is a near-total vacuum. Its cast is overwhelmingly white and British, with Olivia Munn and a Chinese gangster named Fang drifting through the proceedings while nobody pauses to remark on their presence. That is not a statement. It is casting. Johanna exists to be a wife, Georgina exists to be a seductress, and neither is granted an interior life or a thesis. Ethnic villains of the Chinese and Russian variety are played for slapstick, and the Nazi gold functions purely as a MacGuffin, a shiny object to be chased and never examined. Wealth here is a punchline about unpaid taxes, not a system to be dismantled.

The film offers no environmental sermon, no meditation on neurodivergence, no celebration of bodies, no critique of capital, and no lecture of any kind. It simply wants to be a breezy caper about a dishonest aristocrat and his loyal manservant. It fails at that as well, mostly. Left behind is a curious artifact: a movie that offends almost nobody on ideological grounds and offends nearly everyone on comic ones. There is something almost restful about it. A picture this indifferent to the culture wars deserves a small measure of credit for the sheer consistency of its disinterest.