Ironically, Depp's current struggles with playing a specific type of role may be the result of his greatest success, his performance as Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. In 2003, Time Out London summarized Depp's Academy Award-nominated performance in the following way.

Depp invests this overfed, action-tractioned swashbuckler with a voluptuous wit and spry spontaneity it surely doesn't deserve. Resplendent in beaded dreadlocks and kohl, he plays Captain Jack Sparrow as a purring East End dandy ... When the actor's on screen he singlehandedly makes the film not only bearable but—dare we say it?—recommendable.

Since The Curse of the Black Pearl, Depp's "spontaneity" has all but evaporated. Over the past decade the series has repeated the same formula in three successive sequels, each of which has relied on squeezing every ounce of life out of Captain Jack, then filling him back up and doing it again.

When he hasn't been playing the beloved pirate, Depp has spent much of his time trying (and failing) to recreate the magic of the Captain in other roles. This was perhaps most evident in The Lone Ranger, which saw Depp team up with Pirates director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and don whiteface, a headdress, and a jilted speech pattern to play the Indian chief Tonto. "They're putting Pirates of the Caribbean in a saddle and pretending we won't notice," wrote film critic Peter Travers in his review for Rolling Stone.

Since Sweeney Todd in 2007, Depp has enjoyed virtually no critical success. What's worse, he's overplayed his shtick so many times that it's become almost like parody. In 2010's Alice in Wonderland, Depp's Mad Hatter had all the components of characters like Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd, and Jack Sparrow—heavy makeup, lipstick, eccentric hair, a British accent, stylized gestures—with none of the substance. As Manohla Dargis put it in her review of the film for The New York Times, "Mr. Depp doesn’t have much to do, which he proves as he wildly flirts with the camera."

With similarly "little to do" in subsequent roles, Depp has, ironically, been doing way too much. Nowhere was this more evident than in his last collaboration with Burton, 2012’s Dark Shadows, in which Depp played Barnabas Collins, an 18th century vampire who returns to his childhood home during the 1970s. Writing about Dark Shadows for The Atlantic, Christopher Orr aptly summarized the Johnny Depp fatigue as "weariness amid the weirdness."

It's not that Depp has simply starred in bad movies of late (a given for any actor who's been around for more than 20 years). It's that he’s become content to serve up the same character with slight tweaks (a mustache here, orange hair there) again and again.

Part of the reason for Depp's success as Jack Sparrow was both that the role was unique and unexpected and that Captain Jack was the only quirky character in the film. Much of the hilarity of The Curse of the Black Pearl is that both Depp and Captain Jack seem to be trolling the rest of Disney's painfully earnest cast of characters. Over the last few years, Depp's characters have seemingly been jockeying for position as the quirkiest person in fictional worlds that are already stuffed to the brim with talking rabbits, witches, Davey Joneses, and Lone Rangers. When he's opted for more traditional fare in films like The Tourist and Transcendence, both the movies and Depp have fallen flat (The Tourist was one of the worst reviewed movies of 2010 and Transcendence was short-listed for a Golden Raspberry Award for 2014's Worst Picture of the Year).

Unfortunately, Depp seems intent on continuing to beat the same old drum for the foreseeable future: Next up is a sequel to Alice in Wonderland in 2016, followed by the fifth (yes, the fifth) installment of Pirates of The Caribbean the following year.

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