Got Me Out of The Couch.

Rating: Null/10 (11 August 2003)

I have to admit that I didn't have high hopes for Pirates of the Caribbean. Orlando Bloom speaks in a flat monotone voice, I had no idea of who Keira Knightly was, and I hadn't heard a peep out of Johnny Depp or Geoffrey Rush for ages. Besides, wasn't I too old for Disney movies anyway? After the poor special effects job I saw on Ang Lee's `The Hulk', I was wondering how the people at Disney could pull off pirate skeletons. What I expected and what I got were two very different things.	Cursed undead pirates led by Captain Barbossa (Rush) kidnap the aristocratic Elizabeth Swann (Knightly) in hopes of removing the curse that turns them into walking skeletons by full moonlight. Her long-time admirer Will Turner (Bloom) sets out to rescue her with the help of wanted pirate Jack Sparrow (Depp). It's a conventional plot with conventional characters, and if I said any more, I'd ruin the whole story. Everybody played his or her roles very stereotypically. The person who single-handedly saved the show was Depp. Of course it looks like he's getting electric shocks to his face, and with all that makeup he might be an exotic dancer in the off-season, but Depp really got involved with his character, and it shows. He's always there to provide some hilarity to an otherwise dry movie. His dueling scenes with Bloom and Rush are easily among the best fighting sequences in the movie. (The rest of the fight scenes were pretty bad) Depp even had a handful of his teeth replaced by gold ones just to look the part. He had to take some out, or risk overacting.
Although he'd reportedly like to be in a movie that doesn't involve swords, Bloom is certainly good with them. It's a long jump from a blonde archer elf to a swashbuckling blacksmith-turned-pirate, but he excels at it. All the sword handling he used as Legolas certainly hasn't gone to waste. However, the big fluffy hat with a feather in it that he used wore in the last few scenes looked terrible on him.	Disney took a big risk on this movie. This is the first movie made by Disney to get a rating higher than PG. By getting a PG-13 rating, they risked alienating the moviegoers who thought that this movie would be more kid-friendly. The title was even changed from `Pirates of the Caribbean' to `Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl' in hopes that there could be a sequel. This is also the first live-action movie made by Disney in a long time. It's obvious that Disney poured a lot of money into this project, and Disney and viewers certainly got what they paid for.	But this movie does have its downsides. Bloom and Knightly couldn't make a less convincing couple if they had been in separate movies. The movie did stretch on just a little bit too long, and it's hard to create life-and-death situations with pirates who just can't die. Too much of the pirates' conduct is governed by a set of rules, which are more like guidelines anyway, as is pointed out several times in the movie. Captain Sparrow spends too much time in jail, and past events are hinted at too much.	Despite the length of the movie and all the rest of its shortcomings, Pirates of the Caribbean has revived a genre I thought was long dead and buried. A genre I thought belonged only to yesteryear.	That's all I have to say about that.