Hollywood A-lister Johnny Depp has delivered a startling fall-from-grace character portrait in the final act of the legal/biosecurity thriller nobody expected: one part intrepid dog movie and two parts international relations drama, like The International by way of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, with a dash of Midnight Express thrown in.
The pulse-pounding first act starts with a clock-is-ticking twist, harking back to Depp’s 1995 political action movie, Nick of Time. In that film, the actor was assigned an hour and a half to escape political hot water in the 90s; in this, he and his partner/co-star, Amber Heard, are granted a more generous 50 hours by the Australian agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce.
Joyce makes a fairly deranged villain; the couple’s dogs, he snarls, will be executed by the government if Heard and Depp fail to remove them from the country in time. Yorkshire terriers Pistol and Boo radiate a natural if understated gravitas in their breakthrough performances.
Thus a moral dilemma to springboard the second act: who do we root for? The bad arse, blasé, aviator-clad, double-earring wearing hunk and his beautiful partner (Heard is terrific here; her doe-eyed presence recalls the early work of French New Wave pioneer Anna Karina)? Or the burly, weatherbeaten borderline psychopath, who just threatened to use federal powers to execute the couple’s adorable tiny dogs? It is a difficult choice.
Tension slackens in the second act, as the key players spend more time independent of each other, and the plot takes on some implausible developments. In an improbable turn of events, Joyce becomes the deputy prime minister of Australia: surely an act of over-reaching on behalf of the screenwriters. A second unexpected twist sees Heard take centre stage and emerge as the key player.
Media outlets the world over had reported Pistol and Boo as Depp’s dogs; he was therefore at the core of the narrative. Few people could have anticipated Heard would emerge as the protagonist, a sort of reverse The Lady Vanishes. She was here all the time.
And nobody, bar nobody, could possibly have imagined how this sensational affair would end. First, there’s a courtroom scene – more sombre than suspenseful – in which a repentant Heard pleads guilty to falsifying an immigration document.
But it’s the final scene that’s surprise clincher: rough and tense, like a home-shot version of Black Mirror crossed with London Has Fallen. Or, more simply, something that looks quite a lot like a hostage video.
Talking direct-to-cam in a low-angle shot, Depp on the left and Heard on the right, the pair sit in front of nondescript off-white curtains appearing stiff and solemn, looking like botched statuettes from the world’s saddest Madame Tussauds museum. Heard speaks of Australia’s “treasure trove of unique plants” and Depp morosely advises viewers to “declare everything when you enter Australia”.
He performs a small nod of his head but to who? To the audience, in a fourth-wall-breaking moment? Or to somebody just off-screen? Could Joyce also be there, holding up a script for the pair to read while their entourage sit in the adjacent room with potato sacks on their heads?
Like the final, cryptic shot in the great Austrian director Michael Haneke’s psychological thriller Hidden, we can’t ever be sure.
