This murky-looking misfire about noted 17th century sensualist/poet John Wilmot is the anti-Merchant-Ivory. It could also quite possibly be the worst film Johnny Depp has ever made.

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Libertine is a grungy biopic but is itself devoid of any appeal to the senses and shortchanges us on anything truly decadent other than John Wilmot's binge drinking. Wilmot (Johnny Depp), the Earl of Rochester, was a favorite of King Charles II (John Malkovich), and better known for his debauched excesses than…

The newly formed Weinstein Company is giving this wild thing a limited release in the hopes of getting Oscar attention for Johnny Depp. No argument here. You have to admire an actor who finds time between the family franchises of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Pirates of the Caribbean to sandwich in the role of the dazzlingly debauched John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. It's hard to tell what shocked seventeenth-century England the most about the earl. His depraved poetry? His…