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'Pirates' sets sail, sort of |
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Written by McClatchy-Tribune
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Wednesday, 05 July 2006 |
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SHORT REVIEW
"Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest"
4 out of 5 stars
PG-13, for intense sequences of adventure violence, including frightening images
Cast: Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, Bill Nighy, Naomie Harris
Director: Gore Verbinski
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
LONG REVIEW
Here’s the movie to put the giddy back in the giddy-ap of summer. Saucy, sassy, swashbuckling “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” has more of everything we loved from the first “Pirates” movie — more fights, more spectacle.
More Johnny Depp. More “yo ho ho.” More rum.
Depp is back as Capt. Jack Sparrow, on the Caribbean on his beloved pirate ship, The Black Pearl. He’s got another price on his head, and another curse/deal-with-the-devil payment due.
Hey, nobody said this was the least bit original.
Will and Elizabeth (Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley) are out of his life, and about to be married. Until they’re arrested for helping Jack escape. Will is blackmailed into chasing down Jack to fetch his enchanted compass, which the East India Company covets.
And at first Will, then Elizabeth, make their way through the piratical sea (another trip to the Tortuga pirates theme park), we learn what Jack wants in exchange.
He’s in Dutch with another ghostly apparition of the deep. It seems Jack once crossed the legendary sailor’s ghost, Davey Jones. So he has Davey (Bill Nighy, hidden under a sea-monster mask) and his spectral crew of half-man/half sea-beasts and The Flying Dutchman after him. And Davey, in a nice touch, has a back story that drives the plot.
The set pieces — a splendid cannibal encounter that includes the best shish kebab joke ever, a sea chase, a sea battle, sword-fights in a rolling water wheel — are effects-driven, and all tilt toward the supernatural.
Davey Jones has this sea monster he summons up to do his dirty work — the Kraken. Why would Disney of Disney World spend hundreds of millions plugging a sea-creature roller-coaster at Sea World? Just wondering.
Like too many summer movies of late, “Dead Man’s Chest” is overlong. It begins slowly — badly almost — before director Gore Verbinski finds his footing. And then he loses that footing again for the finale. If this is the movie of the summer, it wins almost by default. It’s a little better than “Superman” or “X-Men” or “Da Vinci,” only because it’s more fun.
There’s too much plot to keep track of. When it errs, it errs on the side of darkness — visits to the jungle home of a voodoo priestess (wonderful Naomie Harris of “Tristram Shandy”), a supposedly guilt-ridden connection between Will and his doomed pirate dad (Stellan Skarsgard, very good).
But this is, at heart, a lark, a teetering theme-park ride built on a track of toothpicks.
Fortunately, the toothpicks are a cast that plainly delights in this material. Knightley and Bloom give this more effort than most would bother with.
A couple of funny supporting players — Lee Arenberg and MacKenzie Crook — blacken their teeth and deliver one zinger after another.
“The Captain seems to be a bit strange,” one says to another, only to earn an incredulous look. “Errrrrrrrrr,” he adds to “strange,” just to clarify.
And Depp has at long last gotten comfortable with what a “movie star” performance is. He staggers. He mugs, doing more stuff with his eyes than a human should. He runs like C-3PO, wrists raised, head back. He says he based this guy on Rolling Stone Keith Richards, who has signed on to play his dad, or mentor, in the third “Pirates” movie. Depp, all dreadlocks and eye shadow, scarves and tattoos, gives us something funny to look at or listen to in every single shot.
“Why izzzza rum always gone?” Depp slurs in his best ‘Dudley Moore-as-Arthur’ accent. He hiccups. And rising to his feet, he swoons and pats his chest, as if fumbling for the punchline. Fortunately for us, and the movie, he finds it.
“Oh (hic)! That’s why.”
By Roger Moore, McClatchey-Tribune
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