IAISO

You can almost see Johnny Depp salivating at the concept of a huge comeback with Ebenezer. There’s an easy narrative for Depp and his fans that goes like this: One of the biggest movie stars in the world was unfairly canceled following abuse allegations from his ex-wife, Amber Heard. He sued her in the U.S., won damages, and now that his good name has been restored (as long as you ignore how the U.K. ruled when Depp pursued legal action), he’s ready to return as the beloved “Master Of Mischief” cited in the trailer for Ebenezer, which notes his past roles as Jack Sparrow, Edward Scissorhands, and The Mad Hatter. Before you know it, he’ll be back to opening billion-dollar movies.

But to reach this conclusion, you have to assume that Depp’s popularity never died off, and was merely interrupted by an out-of-control and utterly unfair #MeToo movement (again, you’d have to ignore any other allegations of violent behavior). All of this breezes past Depp’s dismal 2010s, where—despite previously reaching superstardom thanks to the success of the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies and Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice In Wonderland—he had become box-office poison. If the 2000s were the zenith of a career that felt like it had finally come to fruition by embracing the kind of weirdos Depp knew how to play, the 2010s were about coming back down to earth, unable to satisfy audiences who felt like they had seen everything the actor had to offer.

The drop-off began around 2012. While his stardom was able to pump a fourth Pirates movie past the $1 billion mark and he was able to give a fun voice performance in 2011’s Rango, reteaming with Tim Burton for Dark Shadows was not the summer hit Warner Bros. was hoping for. The adaptation of a cult 1960s gothic soap opera limped to a modest $245 million worldwide gross off a pricey $150 million budget. An even bigger flop arrived the following year with The Lone Ranger, a misguided attempt to recapture the magic between Depp and original Pirates director Gore Verbinski. The film was plagued with production problems, while audiences weren’t thrilled at seeing “pretendian” Depp play Tonto. He also wears a dead crow as a hat.

The 2010s kept repeating a similar story: Depp could no longer connect with audiences. If he tried playing a normal guy, like Will Caster in Transcendence, it was deathly dull, with Depp doing little more than sitting in front of a black screen to show that he was now an AI singularity. More often, he attempted endless affectations; the outlier during this era was when Depp played for awards by “disappearing” into the role of Whitey Bulger in Black Mass. If audiences were still with Depp, then they would have shown up for the shenanigans of Mortdecai, or at least turned out to see him reprise the role of Mad Hatter in Alice Through The Looking Glass. But the Alice sequel grossed less than a third of what the original made.

An attempt to plug him into the Fantastic Beasts franchise backfired, not only because of the tepid audience interest in Harry Potter prequels, but because the first film teased Colin Farrell as the bad guy—only to have him turn out to be Johnny Depp’s Grindelwald in disguise. When Warner Bros. replaced Depp with Mads Mikkelsen for the third and final Beasts installment, there was no backlash. The change was greeted with a shrug.

Depp has kept working like nothing has changed aside from the size of his films, starring in tiny fare like City Of Lies, Waiting For The Barbarians, Minamata, and Jeanne Du Barry. His return in Ebenezer is an attempt to show back up in a wide-release studio film like nothing has changed, and it would be rude to ask him to be a more thoughtful and diligent performer. Even Paramount knows the actor is far from a sure thing: Depp’s asking price dropped to $5 million (a far cry from the $20 million he used to command) and Ebenezer itself only carries a budget of $38 million. While this could be portrayed as a careful return, it assumes that audiences missed Depp in the first place.

But for a comeback, Ebenezer shows how little interest Depp has in anything beyond being a sentient pile of scarves and rings who does funny voices and makes faces. Ti West’s surrounding picture wants to be a hard-edged-if-PG-13 horror film that leans into the ghost story aspect of A Christmas Carol. Depp, on the other hand, returns to a form audiences have tired of: He cannot stop mugging for the camera, playing like a cartoon character while the surrounding ensemble highlights the disturbing levels of deprivation in Dickensian London. It feels like a desperate attempt to recapture the magic of Pirates or even Sleepy Hollow by playing a colorful character in the center of otherwise spooky occurrences. But in those films, Depp and his directors were on the same page. In Ebenezer, he’s just riding roughshod over the picture.

Depp’s approach to Ebenezer functions as a metaphor for his career from the 2010s forward. Rather than performing with any honesty, Depp wants to hide his uninteresting and predictable performance beneath layers of makeup. At least an actor like Nicolas Cage makes choices that can surprise the audience; he gives audiences the madness of Willy’s Wonderland in the same year as the quiet intensity of Pig. Depp merely hopes that a surplus of outlandish costumes will once again suffice for, in the case of Ebenezer, a lot of shouting.

Perhaps this steadfast refusal to read the room is what once drove Depp. While he could have sold himself as a heartthrob from his debut in A Nightmare On Elm Street and success on 21 Jump Street, he stood out from his contemporaries by taking stranger roles. The warm reception towards the affectation-driven Jack Sparrow seemingly confirmed his instincts. To turn away from that now would be a betrayal of what brought him such massive success in the first place, and require acknowledging that his career problems aren’t just scandal-driven. But Depp has demonstrated trouble taking accountability, so it makes sense that he’d refuse to change approaches even after audiences have mostly rejected him over the last decade and a half. The result is a washed-up actor going through the motions, feigning boldness in the least bold of places, yet another Christmas Carol adaptation.