Johnny Depp's Career Needs A Reboot

I think it's official. Transcendence will be Johnny Depp's fourth straight starring role that is not bringing in the numbers. The other three being Dark Shadows, The Rum Diary and The Lone Ranger.

How sad is it that the last movie that was financially successful was the fourth installment of Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which was the weakest in the franchise.

I actually liked Dark Shadows and The Lone Ranger, despite how critically abysmal they were. But all of these had Johnny Depp in ostentatious garbs, with full-on make-up and eye-liner. And his performance shared similarities with one another, always the loony kind.

So much so that watching Transcendence where he acted as a "normal" person felt a little out of place for me. I couldn't wrap my mind around such a subdued performance at first and it took a bit of time getting used to the fact that he didn't have to prance around the screen at any point in time.

But having said that, I am also tired of the usual and loud Johnny Depp performance that's larger than life onscreen. The next time we see Depp may very well be the fifth Pirates movie, and I do think this is a step in the wrong direction for his career.

There's almost no more freshness or surprise that we can expect from Depp. If he continues to go back to something that we're familiar with will not help his cause, not at all. He has become predictable and it's such a waste to see. What he and his agent should be doing is to find something challenging, something that's human and emotional; something that's new and unexpected.

While Transcendence could have been just that, it wasn't a good movie to begin with and he didn't have much to do in the second half. It wasn't enough for him to convince us that he's still got some serious acting chops when stripped away of all the Hollywood make-up.

Stop going back to Pirates, stop working with Tim Burton for a while, stop having those urges to paint your face. Go be a superhero maybe (not a villain or it'll still be back to familiar territories). Just do something different and show us that you still care to make great movies.