To celebrate the opening of the fourth Pirates movies — Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — here is my original review of the second movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. My review of the new movie will be posted Friday morning.
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I blame the marketing of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest because the commercials are selling the movie as one complete entity. That’s the wrong approach to use on the most anticipated movie of the summer, especially when it ends … well, the way it does — I’m not going to give it away. Kill Bill broke itself into volumes; Pirates needs the same treatment. Or just call it a prequel to No. 3, at least then we know we’re only seeing the beginning of a story.
Ignoring the deceptive cliffhanger lurking toward the end of Dead Man’s Chest, this new Pirates movie plays a lot like the old one: swashbuckling, yadda yadda yadda, canon fire, blah blah blah, Johnny Depp playing Captain Jack Sparrow as a cartoon. No, actually a cartoon drawing of parody of a caricature made from a mascara sketch on a napkin. Depp has taken his drunk captain to the outer limits of reason and the movie suffers for it. What was refreshing and invigorating in the first movie, is simply obnoxious overacting in this one. Luckily Jack and Johnny are given lots to do and their superegos are given breaks during all the swashbuckling.
The new movie concerns a buried pirate’s chest (of course!) which does not contain gold doubloons or Spanish gemstones, but the beating heart of a cursed man who rules the sea, or is ruled by the sea — one of them. Whoever controls the heart controls the man. And since the man has a crew of undead sailors and a giant sea serpent at his disposal he is a valuable asset to control on the high seas.
The man is Davey Jones, a cursed pirate bound by love who roams the seas attacking ships at random. Hundreds of years before we catch up with him, Jones gave himself to the sea as a normal man, but after so long underwater his head is an octopus, his arm a crab claw and barnacles and mussels grow freely on his limbs. His crew, imprisoned for 100 years by their cursed captain, have undergone other hideous transformations; their bodies have taken on so many different kinds of ocean life they are no longer men but sampler platters.
For a variety of reasons, too many to list here, Captain Jack and young Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) head out on the open ocean to retrieve the beating heart before Davey Jones gets wise to the plan and before the East Indian Trading Company can get to it first. I liked the premise, but became more agitated with the plot as the movie unfolded. The movie was a kaleidoscope of redundancy: in two separate scenes giant round things go rolling through the jungle, there are two lengthy sea monster battles that are identical to each other and the motivating factor for every action is the same for all the characters. Everyone wants something and they’re willing to trade anything to get it: Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) for Will, Will for Jack, Jack for a key, the key for Elizabeth, Elizabeth for Elizabeth. Some movies have one exchange sequence, or Mexican standoff, but Pirates is made with them.
Although there is way too much bartering and trading among the characters, not to mention plot holes big enough to sail armadas through — How does Jack become chief of a cannibal village? — Dead Man’s Chest has its high points. They may be clones of each other, but the rolling sequences are fun: one is in a cage made of bones, the other is a sword fight on top of a water wheel. Jack Sparrow’s entrance doesn’t top his entry method in The Curse of the Black Pearl, but it comes mighty close. And some slapstick gags with Jack on a roasting kabob are enjoyable.
Everyone will have their favorite parts. Mine were the character effects of Davey Jones (no mention of his locker) and his crew, one of them being Will Turner’s dead father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgård). At first glance they look like menacing zombies with their guts hanging out of their torsos, but look closer — they are made up entirely of ocean life. One sailor has a live eel protruding from his belly; whether it is a stowaway or actually his stomach is hard to determine. Another character has hermit crabs that take up residence in all the wrong places. Several sailors use swordfish and saw fish as — what else? — real weapons. And I thought the seafood at Sizzler was bad.
All this good stuff aside, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling of disappointment when the movie ended. I wanted a resolution and all I was given was a teaser for a movie next summer. That’s called a rip-off in most parts. In the Caribbean it’s called pirating.
