Villains, heroes, scalawags, and ghosts, skeletons, daring rescues, audacious escapes, and treasure aplenty.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
Thank heaven for Johnny Depp. He turns what could have been merely a good action-adventure film into something of significance, an even better action-adventure comedy.
But let me answer your first question before we go any further. No, there is no concrete evidence, no direct action or actions, in the film to indicate that Depp's character in 2003's "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" is gay. He's supposedly a little mad. There are, however, any number of suggestions--a swishing gait, suspect looks, and effeminate mannerisms in his portrayal--to lead one to the conclusion that Depp's character is anything but your average pirate. Depp has said his inspiration came from observing rock star Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, but surely it's more than that. The Disney people apparently were not initially pleased with his performance, but thank goodness they didn't mess with it too much.
Not that an outright gay pirate would have been a bad thing. Indeed, considering that seafaring men were cooped up together aboard ship sometimes for months at a time, there's no doubt that any sort of behavior occurred. But not in a Disney film. It was bad enough, the company decided, that this would be the first Walt Disney Pictures production ever to get a rating higher than PG. One assumes the PG-13 was applied for frightening images and violence.
Anyway, thanks to Depp's goofy portrayal of woebegone, gold-toothed Captain Jack Sparrow; an equally adroit performance by Geoffrey Rush as the nefarious Captain Barbossa; deft pacing by director Gore Verbinski; clever writing by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio ("Aladdin," "Shrek," "The Mask of Zorro"); spectacular sets and scenery courtesy of producer Jerry Bruckheimer (think "Armageddon," "Black Hawk Down" and "Pearl Harbor" and forget "Kangaroo Jack" and "Bad Boys II"); nifty stunts; and a colorful supporting cast, "Pirates" comes off as a better entertainment than you might expect.
Just don't figure on much in the way of plot. I mean, what do you want from a narrative based on an amusement park ride? "Pirates of the Caribbean" has been one of Disneyland's most-popular attractions for quite some time, and fashioning a story around it that would do it justice must have been a strain. I found the plot somewhat simplistic, repetitious, and predictable. In any case, I doubt that anyone who enjoys the film will care much about its plot deficiencies, the characters and their derring-do amply making up for it. What's more, you get to hear the occasional "Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me," a bonus not to be overlooked. And if the plot seems to make more than a few passing references to Burt Lancaster's "The Crimson Pirate," I would take that as a compliment to good taste.
The story opens at sea with a British naval ship finding adrift the survivor of an apparent pirate encounter. He's a lad, Will Turner, who is soon befriended by a passenger on board, Elizabeth Swann, the daughter of the governor of Port Royal, Jamaica, just after the headiest days of buccaneering in the Caribbean.
Flash forward eight years or so, and we meet the principal players in our drama: Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), now a beautiful young woman; Will (Orlando Bloom of Legolas fame), now a handsome young blacksmith's apprentice (and naturally, Will and Elizabeth have eyes for one another despite their background); Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport), an English prig who fancies marrying Elizabeth himself; Governor Weatherby Swann (Jonathan Pryce), Elizabeth's rather dense father; and the pirate Sparrow (Depp), who sails into port aboard a skiff because he's lost his boat, rescues Elizabeth from drowning, and for his trouble is condemned to hang at dawn as a pirate. That's gratitude.
Barbossa (Rush) enters shortly thereafter as the master of the "Black Pearl," a doomed ghost ship "crewed by the damned and captioned by a man so evil that Hell itself spat him back out." Needless to say, Barbossa sets everything in motion by attacking Port Royal and kidnapping Elizabeth, forcing Will and Sparrow (whose boat the Black Pearl was originally) into an alliance to rescue her. After this lengthy, hour-long setup, the rest of the story recounts the exploits of everyone concerned to get Elizabeth and the boat back. What they don't count on, however, is that Barbossa and his crew are cursed, the living dead, the "undead" (shades of F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu"), and that pirate treasure is involved.
Verbinski may seem an oddball choice to direct a pirate epic. After all, his last movie, "The Ring," was hardly fun and games. But he did do "Mouse Hunt" in 1997 and he was the creator of advertising's Budweiser frogs, so he did have some previous experience in lightweight escapism, which is what "Pirates" excels at. More important, he knows how to thrill an audience with as much that's unseen as seen. Just as "The Ring" was scary without showing much blood and gore, "Pirates" is exciting without showing any serious carnage. Sure, there are battles in abundance and people die, but it's done largely in the old-fashioned way of forties and fifties-style adventure movies. This course is taken partly because it's a Disney picture, of course, and partly because Verbinski prefers letting an audience use its imagination to fill in the details. Certainly, there's no better a landscape for adventure than the human imagination. Besides, the director's always got the art, costume, set design, and special effects people to rely on, too.
The fights are lively and mostly comic, the characters are irascible but charming, and Depp's Sparrow is a joy in every scene: "You seem somewhat familiar," he says to Will when they first meet. "Have I threatened you before?" Moreover, the scenery and photography are beautiful and the sets are elaborate and inventive, especially the ones involving the ghost ship and its unearthly inhabitants.
Average user rating (1-5):
[release]11152[/release]