You Know What? It's Absolutely Fun.

Rating: 8/10 (28 May 2007)

I was a complete sucker for the effects this time. I have grown to dislike franchise films based on the starving and then desperately feeding sweets to mainstream American audiences, the sweets being computer-generated visual effects. Well, this one got me. Gore Verbinski, the director of all three films in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, has a deep, intuitive understanding of the fear, drama, and peace that can be derived from water. The film may not have the brilliantly elaborate sword fights that its predecessors had, but there are many unbelievably dazzling sequences involving pirate ships and the effects the gargantuan ocean has upon them. Horizons, whirlpools, the deep, reflections of the starry night sky, and waterfalls all have their heydays in this epic pleasure of a glossy Hollywood film.
The story is an extensive, elaborate, complicated, extremely verbose one, and most adolescents and children prone to Disney films will often find themselves lost. That is no judgment on their intelligence, only on the expectations the writers have of their target audience. I, however, thought the story hardly left anything to be desired. The fantasy elements of the series are induced with great creativity, as opposed to many fantasy films, which usually tend to have stories that center around incidentally fantastical worlds, with invented creatures, completely objective goals like finding a ring that controls the fate of a race of beings. The Pirates films are actually heavy on plot, and in this third installment, the travel between this world and the afterlife in Davy Jones's Locker is cleverly done. The humor is also becoming more daring, with cynicism, and extreme dryness that is not R-rated, but gives off vibes as though it is.
Johnny Depp has become such a sizzling hot property, and since his nuclear burst of popularity in 2003 has widdled to a universal liking by all and a box office fueled by a stalker's obsession among angsty 13-year-old girls, that the filmmakers have become extremely self-conscious in their handling of Captain Jack Sparrow. I was impressed very much by his introduction in At World's End, which was very fresh and not so corny emerging from a coffin with his guns in his hands across his chest so that the audience can cheer. It brims with happy-go-lucky creativity, but the gimmick is carried too far by being continued and built upon in several scenes throughout the rest of the movie. But I won't deny that there are points where it gets interesting. If I'm being vague, it's because I don't want to spoil it.
One thing I'm definitely becoming concerned about is the amount of violence that's being allowed in Disney films. Smokin' Aces was released in January, and it was a mêlée of grinding, shrieking action violence complete with several gruesome shootouts and a couple of snippets of torture. It was rated R, and no, it was not released by Walt Disney Pictures, but by the standards being set by this film, which opens with a child amongst a line of condemned being prepared for hanging and has a surprisingly disturbing scene wherein Davy Jones's tentacles impale a single man's head through each orifice, it very well could be. During Smokin' Aces, or any other R-rated action film recently, I was not disturbed, and did not make an irksome face, at any violent scene, though several are shown and the body counts are high. In this PG-13-rated film, there were three sequences where I grimaced. Why would the violence be harder in a film designed for kids that is given a much more generous rating than a film designed for older people that is given a very standard rating that is given away like confetti at a parade? Anyway, the verdict is that it is one vastly entertaining epic ride where the characters, as they always are in the Pirates films, maintain an interesting and hairpin-turning arch throughout the series, and the performances by Depp and Geoffrey Rush are as charming as ever. This is coming from a film buff who begrudges billion-dollar franchises founded upon treating audiences like junkies who are so numb and disabled that all they are able to eat now is ice cream.