PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL

Rating: 3

The idea behind PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN is enough to make even the most hopeful of reviewers cringe mightily and reach for an aspirin and an antacid. It’s not based on a book, a play, or even a scenario that can be summed up in one sentence in a pitch meeting. It’s based on a ride. Sure, it’s a ride at Disneyland, but what we’ve got here is a bunch of tourists on a boat floating around gawking at animatronic tableaux of pirates wreaking havoc in the Caribbean.  Wholesome havoc. This is, after all, Disneyland.
Fortunately, Jerry Bruckheimer, he who so enjoys blowing things up, did something smart. He hired Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, who wrote the very smart, very sharp script for SHREK. He also hired Gore Verbinski who directed THE RING and MOUSE HUNT and, hence, has an understanding of both the suspense of walking the plank and the comedy of a pirate crew that’s been at sea just a little too long. And if Jerry had just stood back and let them do what they do best, we’d have a very good film instead of one that is merely very good in places.
Elliot and Rossio have let their imagination run free. These aren’t just pirates, they’re pirates with a wicked cool Aztec curse on them. The hero and heroine are plucky star-crossed lovers who gaze at each other like moon calves, and just for fun there’s Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), who may be either the smartest or dumbest pirate that ever sailed, but is certainly the most eccentric.
The curse involves the stolen treasure of Cortez, who got greedy and ticked off the ancient gods of Mexico. Centuries later, the crew of the Black Pearl found it and then discovered that the acquisition left them not quite dead, but certainly not alive anymore. This means they can’t be killed in battle, but it also leaves them pining for things like eating, drinking, and nooky, all of which are available, but beyond their ability to experience them. Hence, they are a cranky bunch. The curse also leaves them looking like the living skeletons when moonlight hits them, but normal the rest of the time.  
Meanwhile, our heroine, Elizabeth Swann (Kiera Knightly from BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM), has spent a lifetime fascinated by pirates. She’s also been longing for our hero, Will (Orlando Bloom), whom she met when they were children and he was pulled from the sea by the ship bringing Elizabeth and her Governor father (Johnathan Pryce) to Port Royal in the Caribbean. Will grew up to be a blacksmith, Elizabeth the island’s upper crust, and there things stand until the arrival of Sparrow, the pirates, and the explanation for the strange gold medallion Will was wearing when he was rescued and that Elizabeth took while he was unconscious.
Elliot and Rossio infuse the script with the same loopy humor that they did in SHREK. Physical humor abounds and conversations go off kilter and spin off into send ups of dialectics on critical thinking or into just plain silliness. Knightly is steely and quick-thinking as the damsel that can handle anything but a corset that’s been laced too tightly. Bloom acquits himself admirably as a swashbuckling hero, handsome and stalwart, parrying a sword with grace and agility. If he doesn’t have quite the same sparkle as, say Errol Flynn, never mind, there’s Depp to take up the slack. Not with sparkle as such, but with a performance that is, well, odd. Sporting rasta locks entwined with beads and spare change, dark circles painted under his eyes, and the air of someone who’s decided reality is just a bit too much of a chore, he verges on camp and sometimes blithely surrenders to it altogether. Geoffrey Rush as the cursed captain of the Black Pearl is more restrained though he does his share of scaling histrionic heights.
The sets will look familiar to devotees of the Disneyland ride, with scenes such as a group of prisoners using a bone to coax a dog to bring them the keys to their cell. The costumes are lavish, the scenery delightful, and the ships on which everyone spends so much time sailing their way into one scrap after another are beautifully rendered. The ghostly special effects, though, top all that. This is a Bruckheimer film, after all, where everything is done big and splashy. The cursed pirates move in and out of moonlight, smoothly morphing from skeletal to fleshy, sometimes in a piebald fashion. The interesting thing is that even as skeletons, they bear more than a passing resemblance to their mortal coils. They also move realistically, which is just plain eerie looking.
So far, so good. We’ve got good writing, a story that packs adventure, comedy, and surprises. We’ve got effects and performances that are fun to watch. Where we run into trouble is with Mr. Bruckheimer’s penchant for blowing things up, and by this I mean the way he keeps blowing things up long after there is any cinematic necessity for him to do so. So the film, merrily chugging along, buoyed by humor and action, is brought to a dead stop while ships’ cannons and crews batter each other, for example, for much longer than is necessary to advance the story. This delight in pyrotechnics inflates the film to a running time of over two hours while quashing its momentum.  
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN is subtitled THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL. THE CURSE OF TOO MUCH BRUCKHEIMER BOMBAST is more like it.