Richard Says Goodbye

The character's misogyny seems to have bled into the screenplay: Women, be they loveless middle-aged shrews or guileless ingenues, exist here solely to prompt and inspire our downtrodden hero's cathartic disobedience.

Depp's turbocharged archness is basically the whole show. The actor appears as out of whits to give as the man he's playing, with little interest in enunciating clearly or hiding his self-regard.

The film goes down easy because it saves the self-improvement clichés for the homestretch.

This film is an easy target for being misintepreted by those with an axe to grind in the "me too" era; a sadder truth is that its clumsy approach was most likely unintentional.

[The Professor] is more subservient to feel-good cliches than its too-cool-for-school veneer indicates.

Depp, sporting a distractingly foppish, unfurling-flag hairdo, commits to his character's tricky balancing act but over-relies on his signature rakishness to fully convince.

Though Roberts' screenplay draws attention to its structure with frequent chapter headings, it plays like a work that has been victimised by too many editors, each trying to achieve something different.