Mortdecai

A film that is much better than the critics would have said. Unfortunately, it's excessively exaggerated, has a confusing script and excessive sexualized characters and situations.

David Koepp must have been very confident about this project. To make this film, he sought out a little-known character from a series of novels by Kyril Bonfiglioli, an author who will only be known by the English or by those who speak English as a native language. I have never found this author's books in Portugal. The film was a huge financial and critical failure, and I was afraid of what I was going to find, but the truth is that I find it mildly satisfactory.

The film begins by introducing us, in the voice of the protagonist, to the central characters of the plot: the art dealer Charlie Mortdecai, an aristocratic bon vivant, his beautiful wife and his faithful henchman Jock, tough and excessively virile. From here, we follow the protagonist on an adventure in search of a missing painting that could be a work by Francisco de Goya, with a past associated with the Nazis and believed as lost.

This comedy makes a huge effort to be as funny as possible and bets everything on a kind of comedy of exaggerations, in which each character is caricatured and everything is taken to the point of absurdity: Mortdcai, for example, is not just a “marchant d'art”, he's an insolvent aristocrat with tics of grandeur and a fetish for his mustache (okay, I wore a mustache myself, and it was a similar style, but I never let the mustache used me, if you know what I mean). Likewise, Jock is transformed into a mobster and sexual athlete. Exaggeration pays off: it is impossible not to laugh at the absurdity. The most obvious example is the way in which Mortdecai insults the US when he treats it as if it were still an uncivilized British colony.

The problem with exaggeration is that it doesn't work if it's overused: the second half is much weaker because we already know what to expect from the ch...