cute

Rating: 6/10 (15 August 2003)

Fun film. It's the first time I've seen Depp do a crowd-pleasing lead. His Jack Sparrow is pretty much standard Deppian posturing which really works for me, but I was surprised to see it as the centerpiece of a Summer blockbuster. Between Scissorhands and Fear and Loathing, he always seemed to me at least as smart as the script, but in this case he pretty much soars above it and delivers his lines with a real relish for camp.
The rest of the film was sorta okay, which is saying a lot since I generally loath the work of The House of Bruckheimer. Like a lot of other 2.5 hour braindead epics, this one could have edited down for time. It's not Bergman for heaven's sake - the characters beyond Depp's and Rush's (and theirs are all style) are almost cheap cardboard cutouts. The advantage of stock characters is supposed to be economy.
The story is excellent compared to general summer fair, especially in this summer plagued by stories ripped from comics, old TV shows, reality TV, and, in Bruckheimer's other Summer film, a bunch of cop show cliches mashed together. It's not so complex a story that 2.5 hours is necessary.
If producer Bruckheimer has a signature shot it's either 1) that much overused A-Team stunt explosion in the middle ground while a person is catapulted away from it in the fore, arms and legs kicking, or 2) special effect shots THAT NEVER END. In almost any Bruckheimer film there is an effect or stunt that makes you say `wow' and you want to see it again, like the melting heads in Raiders of the Lost Arc once did. With Bruckheimer you can count on seeing that effect over and over and over again during the course of the film until every drop of techno magic is drained.
The shot of the undead pirates walking on the ocean floor was great. It is exactly the sort of imaginative storytelling that has been lacking in many recent blockbuster films.