Great movie, except for Johnny

Rating: 4/10 (13 July 2003)

This movie could have been absolutely fantastic, except for one thing -- Johnny Depp's unfortunate choice of playing Jack Sparrow as a drunken, mumbling git. The movie (though a bit long), is great fun, with swordplay, gunplay, zombies, cannons, and witty dialog -- this last spoiled in part by Depp's insistence on mumbling all his lines. Although apologists say that the character was supposed to be crazy with the sun (for an incident we later learn was only 3 days long, and well-provisioned at that), it seems to me that it was just a completely bad choice of characterization. Better by far to have picked as a model the Burt Lancaster portrayal of Captain Vallo "The Crimson Pirate" (1952 -- as I suspect the writer intended -- "Vallo" --> "Sparrow"). In that movie, Lancaster was perhaps the ultimate "Ha-HA!" character, with the same winking- at-the-audience kind of verve that the Jack Sparrow character sort of had.
(Indeed, the walking-the-boat-across-the-bottom scene is right out of "Crimson Pirate", along with the generally acrobatic ship scenes.) This and various plot holes (which involve massive spoilers, so I'll leave them out) took a possibly great movie, and made it a so-so experience for me...