Elizabeth Swann Discovers a Fetish for Dirt?

Rating: Null/10 (8 August 2006)

I enjoyed this silly and nonsensical movie almost as much as the first one except for the new storyline where Elizabeth Swann falls in love with Jack Sparrow. Jack is a fine dashing comic figure and the center of the movie, but does anyone really want to have sex with him unless you have a dirt fetish as well? Are the writers nuts, or do they really think that women are sexually attracted to bad teeth, dirty fingernails and a grand mincing manner that Quentin Crisp must be envying from the grave? When Elizabeth appears to prefer Jack to the loyal Will Turner, played by the unspeakably gorgeous Orlando Bloom, the moment is jarring and repellent, not funny or romantic. I certainly lost sympathy for Elizabeth in those last minutes, when her behavior made her seem both faithless and downright nutty. I can only hope that the next film corrects this, for her character's butch and moral spunkiness was charming in the first film, and Jack Sparrow should really remain the bizarre, addled, egocentric, unreformed, and unattached pirate that he is.