Top 7- Reasons Johnny Depp is a piece of shit

I do not like the Pirates of the Caribbean films at all so instead of dignifying them with a review, I am talking about something I hate more than that franchise: the star, Johnny Depp. Not only is the man highly overrated as an actor, he is also actually a horrible human being and I want to vent my hatred for him making me sit through another Pirates film. So prepare for seven entries that describe why I hate Johnny Depp although I will first preface this by saying I am not an expert on the man. I have seen a decent selection of his films and will be informing my opinions based on that.


7. The last good film he was in was 21 Jump Street

As I said, I don't profess to be an expert on the man but if you try and think of the last enjoyable film you saw that had Johnny Depp in it, you're probably going to struggle being more recent than his cameo in 21 Jump Street, a film from five years ago. The cameo was brief, sure, but it was entertaining, as the actor showed a level of self awareness and was comically shot in the neck. Between now and then, 9 of his 12 films have received ratings of Rotten on Rotten Tomatoes and also amassed plenty of Razzie nominations too. That this bit part was his best work in years is a bad sign.


6. Literally the most overpaid actor of the past two years

That bit was more subjective, I appreciate that so here are some statistics. According to Forbes, Depp has been the most overpaid actor of the last two years, a title that associates him with the likes of Adam Sandler and late nineties Kevin Costner. What that actually means is it compares how much Johnny Depp costs for his films (often a lot) and how much money those films make back (often very little, with films like Alice Through the Looking Glass and Mortdecai flopping). It feeds into something I'll talk about later but this is something that always annoys me. I've always hated how much footballers are paid for doing a comparatively small amount of work and while I tend to be more lenient on actors due to the fact that I like films, Depp's Brando-esque eccentricity is a little bit sickening.


5. The Pirates franchise

I'm sure most people know Depp's work as Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and many love him for that. Those people, however, are wearing heavily rose tinted glasses. Admittedly, I have only seen the third and fourth films of the franchise so I can't comment on whether the first one is good. I hear it is, I can't argue it. The problem is, these films haven't been good in either of the two that I've seen. They are bloated, CGI fueled messes of action and "characters", built purely to allow Johnny Depp to stagger around screen. He is the worst bit of a franchise that doesn't know when to end and contains scenes of children being hung (in a family film), a franchise that I feel has given us two good things: the Hans Zimmer score, because that man does no wrong, and the Lonely Island parody "Jack Sparrow", a comedic masterclass.


4. He is infuriatingly overrated

This is more of a personal point but I honestly don't get what all the fuss is about. I will admit that he's great in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but that's because his odd, wandering style suits the gonzo feel that the film takes from the book. I also hear good stuff from Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands but I haven't seen those so can't comment. In what I have seen him in, he just seems to be portraying some guy wandering through set, being aggressively quirky. Later era Captain Jack is emblematic of this but a prime example is the Mad Hatter in the Alice in Wonderland remake. He is quirky for the sake of being quirky and staggers about, doing whatever he really pleases. He offers no depth to the craft of acting. The closest he evens gets to the greats that some claim him to be is the eccentricity of later in life Brando, a comparison that is certainly not a good one, despite Apocalypse Now.


3. The whole financial adviser case

Now we're getting to the real shitty stuff. As alluded to earlier, celebrities get paid a lot of money for what they do and Johnny Depp gets paid a lot. With that money, he likes to... Well, spend lavishly is an understatement. He felt the problem was so bad he sued his financial advisers for mishandling his money and then it really gets interesting. They counter sued him and released all of his spending information out and it is quite a read. $30,000 on wine each month, paying for 16 different houses and spending $3 million to blast the ashes of the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson, out of a cannon. At the time of publishing, the case is still ongoing and unless Depp starts being in more franchises (possible but unlikely) or gets his shit together (impossible), this is a news story that we are going to be seeing much more of.


2. He beat his wife Amber Heard

To make this all much more serious for a second, this reason in clearly the biggest one but I didn't want to end the post on such a depressing note. Johnny Depp was briefly married to Amber Heard, a famous actress, and it was a tumultuous relationship. There were headlines at one point about them not declaring that they were bringing their dogs into Australia, something that got them in large amounts of trouble with the wildlife control there and resulted in a depressingly poor apology video from the two. The worst thing to come out of the relationship though was the physical violence. There are photos of the injuries sustained by Heard but I didn't want to put them here, they're easy to find if you want the proof. Ultimately, this led the two to divorce, Depp walking away with half his money, Heard having to live a life post-abuse.


1. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

To end on a slightly lighter note, I want to talk about how genuinely abysmal Tim Burton's remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was. Burton has made some bad films (as a Planet of the Apes fan, it amazes me to see how much worse his film is than so many of the others) but with Depp ever by his side, he reached new depths. I hold the original to be one of my very favourite films and so I'm not exactly coming from an impartial place but what Johnny Depp does with the character of Willy Wonka makes me mad. Gene Wilder's interpretation is one that is timeless and odd but has this sense of actual humanity underneath that all. I know that to try and recapture that would be career suicide but instead, Depp goes to the total opposite version of the spectrum and plays him as 60% quirks, 10% love of chocolate and 30% an amplified version of that weird vibe Michael Jackson gave off sometimes. It may not be the worst thing he's ever done but its the worst for me.