Campy, overdone, and, worst of all, boring--exactly why is Captain Jack sexy?

Rating: 3/10 (1 August 2006)

I'm a teenage girl, and frankly, I really can't see what my peers see in Johnny Depp. I'm no homophobe, but how can a girl find a mincing alcoholic wearing eyeliner sexy? It's as if he played the role so gay that it went over their heads. I'm not saying that Johnny Depp isn't a decent actor, and it's his artistic choice if he feels Captain Jack should be played as homosexual, but I still don't see why anyone female would find him sexy. I can suspend my disbelief, I like Indiana Jones and everything, but I actually laughed at the more unbelievable sequences. Also, as a 3D artist, I marveled at Davey Jones' tentacles. They were absolutely perfect. But the Kraken was patchy at best. Yes, none of this pertains to the plot. To which I respond--what plot? Now, before you write me off as someone who didn't pay attention, I paid a lot of attention to the setup. I understand what's going on. Really, I do. But far too much of this movie had the holes in the plot filled by magic and special effects: the magic compass, the key to the chest that holds the magical heart of Davey Jones, and the magical ship with its hallucinatory crew. I admire the new mo-cap system and all the trouble taken by the VFX team and can sympathize with them, but they went way too far for such a campy movie as this. A question brought up by this movie which I doubt will be fully resolved in the next is: Where exactly is Captain Jack's soul? Logically, it should have gone to Davey Jones when he died. Why, then, must the others go to "the ends of the earth"--a seeming metaphor for the otherworld--to retrieve it? Also, why was Captain Jack unfazed by the thought of dying? If he had no outside assurance that he was to be resurrected, then something like this would have been going through his mind: "Well, my buddy Will just almost killed me in a swordfight, my crew mutinied against me, and my potential girlfriend just as good as killed me, but I think I'll die happy, safe in the knowledge that all these good people will be eager to bring me back from the dead." If, on the other hand, he did have outside assurance that he would be resurrected, namely, the items that he stole from Tia Dalma (which she does not know about), then wouldn't Liz, Will, and the gang's quest to retrieve him from the otherworld be pointless? They would arrive at the otherworld, only to find that Jack had already resurrected himself by other means. Now that's a nice how-d'you-do for them! Overall, my first thought after leaving the theatre was, "I thought camp went out with the '70s!" No matter how much elaborate CG was layered over the fantastic creatures and lack of a plot, the inner camp shines through bright and clear. And that's what mattered.