PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END
**1/2 (out of ****) Starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Chow Yun-Fat, Naomie Harris, Bill Nighy, Stellan Skarsgaard, and Geoffrey Rush Directed by Gore Verbinski & written by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, based on characters created by Elliot, Rossio, Stuart Beattie, and Jay Wolpert, based on the Walt Disney World ride 2007 162 min PG13 How freaking hard is it to throw together a clothesline plot that works in all the setpieces, all the expensive FX, all the wisecracks, and still get us home in 100 minutes? Apparently – if we take the “Pirates” trilogy as an example – it’s damn near impossible, as “Pirates 3” ushers in more needless plot complications, betrayals, characters, showdowns, and exposition. 162 minutes! I like the core of what’s at the “Pirates” franchise and always have: a self-loving and drunken goofball (Johnny Depp’s fun Captain Jack) skirts danger and responsibilities on land and sea, in this world and the next. But “Raiders of the Lost Ark” got the job done in a brisk 115 – everything we need, nothing we don’t. And then, at 162 minutes, “Pirates” doesn’t even have time to show the death of its giant seamonster – the Krakken dies between “Pirates 2” and “Pirates 3!” “Pirates 3” is also really, really violent. I don’t mean bloody or gory or the visceral deaths that make you abhor violence. I mean in a tossed off, casual way, an entire crew of sailors, platoon of soldiers, crowd of cutthroats, or some other large group is killed nearly to a man every 10 or 15 minutes. Bloodless bodies fly out of frame and are forgotten as if death is no big deal. One wonders if PG13 movies like this – and “Lord of the Rings” and “The X-Men” – with their abstract deaths and stratospheric body counts that faze no one are actually more morally corrupting than gut-wrenching blood baths like “Saving Private Ryan.” Anyway, “Pirates 3” is still an improvement over “Pirates 2” if for no other reason than it’s blessed with an end. It’s still not quite a good movie though. “Pirates 1” is the best of the lot because it has a beginning AND an end. And it’s not really a good movie either. Orlando and Keira are still mannequins. The hours spent on their love affair is put to shame by five minutes of the subplot romance between Naomie Harris’ sea-witch and Bill Nighy’s octopus-headed Davey Jones. He and Stellan Skarsgaard are empathic despite the make-up. Geoffrey Rush’s pirate gives Depp a run for his money and Naomie is still hot despite having swallowed what looks to be a jar of ink. Amazingly, her phony accent is more off a turn-off than her teeth. On a side note, no other producer besides Walt Disney and David O. Selznick seems to have acquired so much signature style as “Pirates” producer Jerry Bruckheimer. While the “Pirates” movies aren’t his best – by some weird twist his name is attached to “Blackhawk Down” – they are perhaps his most quintessential. Whether sincere or not about his beer-commercial mentality, Bruckheimer movies tend to follow how the “buttoned-down pencil pushers” keep down “us real guys on the street.” Top Guns and Bad Boys don’t have time for “the rules” any more than the imprisoned heroes of “The Rock” and “Con Air” or Nick Cage’s break-the-law-to-preserve-the-law hero of “National Treasure.” “Armaggedon’s” roughnecks take this pandering paradigm to an unbearable extent. Bruckheimer may reach his zenith with “Pirates,” in which his titular heroes are never actually shown committing an act of piracy! True, the Imperial powers (portrayed as villains in “Pirates”) raped and murdered just as much as pirates, but that only puts the two sides on equal moral ground. In purely cinematic language, however, the “Pirates” are hounded for being different, for being rock stars or punks or Goths or whatever. As far as we know, their money just comes out of thin air. Anyway, “Pirates 3” is not without its charms, among them a pirate ship that seems lost in the sky, a Buster Keaton-esque showdown in a storm, a race in a whirlpool, a character stepping into a private inferno, and Johnny Depp in general. A long sequence finds him in a private hell, just him and his ship, run aground, with no one by a crew of clones of himself. That part’s pretty good, almost like an art film snuck into a blockbuster behemoth. Finished Saturday, July 28, 2007 Copyright © 2007 Friday & Saturday Night Back to home. |