Fear and loathing in San Juan

“The Rum Diary” is a mess of a film that attempts to be a slicker sibling to “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” but winds up falling completely flat.

Johnny Depp plays Paul Kemp, a less drug-addled, more alcoholic Raoul Duke who travels to Puerto Rico to freelance for an English language newspaper. Whereas Terry Gilliam’s film let Depp’s Hunter S. Thompson surrogate explore the outer bounds of personal depravity, Bruce Robinson’s inserts him into increasingly implausible situations beyond his control and forces him to play a hero role that’s clearly ill-fitting of him.

These situations unfold in such a scatterbrained way that the film completely bypasses its director’s attempt to create a picaresque feel before settling on total incoherence. Some scenes last barely a minute, lend no greater meaning to the movie and appear totally out of any logical sequence. Yet, Robinson gives cues that they matter to the grander plot, which is ostensibly about a failing newspaper making one last great stand against corruption.

Needless to say, that sincerity feels misplaced and ultimately rings hollow in such a muddled film. The movie doesn’t saddle actions with consequences — one reporter at the newspaper regularly listens to Hitler speeches on vinyl and never shows up for work, yet the crusty editor-in-chief (Richard Jenkins) doesn’t fire him. Suggesting that this ragtag group would suddenly band together because the new freelancer said so doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

But then, nothing in this film does. A scene in its final third sees Kemp and roommate Sala (Michael Rispoli) taking a government-grade hallucinogen in the form of eye drops. They start, believe it or not, hallucinating, and suddenly “The Rum Diary” becomes a very different kind of film. For about five minutes, anyway. Then it stops being that kind of film and bounces on to another.

It’s this lack of focus — along with a dialed-in lead performance by Depp and lazy cinematography that shows the beauty of Puerto Rico’s coast and little else — that keeps “The Rum Diary” from being much more than a two-hour diversion. It’s barely even that.