Flailing the high seas.

Rating: 5/10 (9 August 2013)

I suppose the fact that Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl depicts a sword fight between two immortals that lasts for several minutes is really the clincher that the film does not amount to much more than a bit of throwaway nonsense. The scene, wherein it is readily identified by both parties that the futility of their actions can be equated only to their skills in sword fighting in the first place, epitomises just how much director Gore Verbinski is enjoying himself and just how much his audience aren't. For many years, the notion of what happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object has befuddled physicists; it may very well have to take second stage to the conundrum of what happens when two invulnerable forces do battle to the death. Do not think there is any attempt at solving such a riddle, for the director is merely pleased with the fact he's bringing all of this spectacle to life in the first place. It falls to all the usual Hollywood mistakes and annoyances: visual and oral bombardment consisting of grandeur tracking shots put to a booming score, while the completely ill-judged decision to cut back and forth from harmless comedy to scenes of a massacre represents American event-movie directing at its very worst. Like most of its ilk, it's too long and while there is some heady adventure in there at times, the film is too bad too often to actually get too excited about.
There is no secret in the fact the film struggles with its narrative, seemingly desiring to balance the role of protagonist between three different people but only really ending up telling the story of a doomed crew to a series of fancy edits and prolonged sword fights. Somewhere down the line, ideas either ran out or became cross contaminated; the film is quite so evidently in love with its opening act that it hardly seems to want to launch its characters into a quest, while restless audiences will merely crave the opposite. And then there is that opening act, where, for all the errs of its ways and evident mistakes later on, the film starts surprisingly well. Beginning several years before the main body of the text, the film first depicts Elizabeth Swann on board a British galleon during the colonial era spying a young boy in the water. Once aboard, she discovers his true nature in that he's a pirate – a sworn enemy to those on board but she keeps it a secret out of feeling quite fond for him and not wanting to see him lose his life. As the years pass, Swann grows up into Keira Knightley while the boy matures into Orlando Bloom's Will Turner and they stay loosely connected; he becoming a blacksmith, she already in the rarefied circles of already being a Navy Governor's daughter.
As a young adult, Swann is living a suffocating life on this Jamaica-based outpost of the Empire; suffocating in every sense of the word in as much her tight fitting corset apparel is forced upon her just as much as her father's will seemingly is. Played with an ample amount of both sneer and sympathy by Jonathan Pryce, daddy sees fit to remind her that a certain Navy Commodore with a name like Norrington would make a fine suitor. Elizabeth can only wish for something more, something in the form of Turner with whom she would never stand a chance but for her peers. Enter Johnny Depp's rambling Jack Sparrow; a smooth talking, all-action although ultimately unorthodox pirate who doesn't shoot first and ask questions later since he doesn't carry a firearm and is too busy dropping a one-liner on you as he makes his daring escape anyway. Certainly, when compared to the other pirates in the jail cells, Sparrow strikes us as somewhat different; a man who risks capture if it means saving a life but is cold enough to exploit the life if it means saving his own. The initial incident launching everyone into motion arrives when Geoffrey Rush's evil Captain of the damned attacks the British fort and takes Elizabeth, something that forces the previously at-odds Sparrow and Turner into going after her by themselves.
Structurally, the film spends too long in the port city of Port Royal before finally launching itself on the gigantic quest encompassing nautical traversing; un-dead enemies and a whole host of fight scenes. Thirty minutes into the actual adventure, we want to go back to Jamaica; where ramshackle characters with problems; desires and feelings played out in an environment brought to screen intelligently and energetically with a rich amount of costume and mise-en-scene for the colonial era when Britain ruled the waves. The film is generally problematic, with Depp and Bloom's buddy partnership not hitting the mark and this ridiculous narrative falling in on itself when further complications arise to do with the banishing of a curse. Once enough is enough, the film begins to outstay its welcome; the score gets louder and things that might've resembled human beings in the early part have become action figures for a child's imagination during playtime. The film is far from terrible and it's made with a boyish enthusiasm, but with the money; design and, some might say, the cast quite evidently at hand, enthusiasm and good intentions are not enough.