The big conglomerates have pretty much driven the little guys out of business, you know?...Oh, the movie, right.

Rating: 2/10 (2 July 2007)

Johnny Depp must work a potent magic on his admirers: by its power he's able to communicate to them, and to them alone, the character he has it in his head that he's portraying. The rest of us have to do a good deal of guessing, since the actor goes only a little way in manifesting his purpose by means of the normal external signs, e.g. facial expressions, body language, tones of voice. Lacking these to go by, I hazard that in this movie he thinks he's impersonating a would-be buccaneer who's generally too drunk, lazy, incompetent, or good-natured to carry off his boasted predations: a role for a W. C. Fields or Wallace Beery, not a performer with the look and the aura of a spoiled altar-boy twenty years past his prime. The star's deficiency might have been compensated for in some measure by intelligent casting of the leading lady; but the one we have here is Keira Knightley, doing her usual, i.e. wanly striking poses for an imaginary photo shoot. The villain, Geoffrey Rush, supplies the color and panache the other two lack; but there's not enough of him to go around. The movie is rather at pains to present itself as a piece of good fun; but for me it was a piece of hard work, all on account of the director (the same one who bumbled up the American "Ring"). He appears to have one virtue: shooting all the script he has, so that all the pieces are there, as they often are not in films these days. But the pieces are nearly all wrong: in the staging, the perspectives and proportions are so far off what one might imagine in reading the script (or any of its published story-izings) that one almost has to revisualize the movie as it goes to get what it's about. And the script, which is a mishmash at best, is confusing in places. The first scene ends with the pirate ship bearing down on its apparent target...and then what? Pondering this enigma distracted me from subsequent developments for a good hour or so; not that they compelled much interest in themselves. I feel a gallon of ill will toward this movie: as a product for sale, which is all it is (it's a lot farther from being a work of art than the amusement ride that inspired), it's a piece of inferior merchandise, with its seams still unfinished. Yet buyers seemed not to see that. Depp's magic at work again?