A fun ride

Rating: Null/10 (26 October 2003)

A key moment in "Pirates of the Caribbean" comes with our first glimpse of Johnny Depp as Captian Jack Sparrow. He's standing proudly atop the mast of his vessel as it sails into Port Royal, hair rustling in the wind, the score thundering in full galleon-plowing-the-waves mode. Then a couple shots later, it's revealed that Jack's "ship" is a battered dingy so full of leaks that it makes the last several feet into port mostly submerged. The anticlimactic entrance sets the same tongue-in-cheek feel I remember from the Disney theme park ride which inspired the film. It's this sense of fun that saves the movie--if Gore Verbinski had approached the material in all seriousness (a la "Cutthroat Island"), "Pirates" would have been unendurable. As it is, we've got a nice popcorn movie on our hands, where the pleasures are occasionally guilty, but pleasures nonetheless.
The "Black Pearl" of the subtitle is a pirate ship--Jack Sparrow's ship, or at least it was before his first mate Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) led a mutiny and marooned him. But not long afterwards, the Black Pearl's crew runs afoul of some cursed Aztec gold, which dooms them to an undead existence (as Jack himself points out, the whole mutiny business kind of worked out for him in the long run). In a rather gruesome echo of "Swan Lake," the cursed pirates appear normal until exposed to moonlight, which reveals them as decayed cadavers. To break the curse, they need a certain medalion and a blood tribute, both of which end up involving the high-born Elizabeth (Kiera Knightley), and blacksmith Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), who worships her from afar.
Along the way, there's as many chases, escapes, ship battles, swordfights, and general swashbuckling as you'd expect in this kind of film--perhaps even more. It's somewhat unfortunate that the best of these sequences should be the first, a duel between Jack and Will in a smithy. But there are some nice visuals during the climax, with the undead pirates darting in and out of shafts of moonlight.
Ultimately, though, this movie belongs to Johnny Depp. He's made a career of playing characters who are slightly odd, but Jack Sparrow is perhaps the oddest of them all. Looking more than slightly seedy and moving as if he's perpetually falling off-balance, Jack has the manic gleam of someone who's very brilliant and/or very crazy. He doesn't just march to his own drummer, he's a rhythm all to himself. That Geoffrey Rush manages to match Depp for energy speaks a lot for his talent. These are two actors clearly enjoying themselves to the hilt, and their joy carries over to the audience. About all the rest of the cast can do is try to keep up with them. Bloom, who has the unenviable task of playing straight man to Depp, manages very well in the young lover role. Looking more rugged and less ethereal than he does in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, he establishes his candicacy as a bona-fide leading man. I also liked the work of Jack Davenport as the Royal Navy officer who's Jack's nemisis and Will's romantic rival. Such a character could easily have been your standard-issue unimaginative stiff, but Davenport fleshes out the part nicely.
The greatest weakness of "Pirates" is the ending, which extends the resolution out far longer than feels necessary. But the trip there is a delightful one, delivering laughs and action in equal shares. Drink up, me harties.