What’s with the subtitles? Is it an attempt to emulate the success of The Lord of the Rings? That trilogy, as you know, follows the JRR Tolkien format and has a fresh subtitle per movie: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King (coming out in December) respectively. Is someone hoping a little of that magic will rub off? In title terms, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which isn’t even part of a series (yet), is getting close to the sheer cumbersomeness of the above, though it’s a definite article short of the full house.
And it’s not as bad as the forthcoming mouthful of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life or the Star Wars series, where we have such indigestibles as Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace. George Lucas even went so far as to rename the earlier trilogy, so that, for instance, the simply titled first movie, Star Wars itself, became Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope. One hardly knows where to put the colon.
Never mind the title, though. What’s important about Pirates of the Caribbean is that it’s a pirate movie, not a popular genre in recent years. Roman Polanski lost a fortune on his 1986 comedy Pirates, the last pirate movie anyone can think of. Now the high-seas swashbuckler has been updated for the action-movie age and it works a treat. In Pirates of the Caribbean, Kiera Knightley plays the daughter of the British governor (Jonathan Pryce) of a Caribbean island. She is betrothed to a stiff young military officer, but she has a secret fascination for pirates. This goes back to a childhood experience featuring a shipwrecked boy, now a young man (Orlando Bloom) living on the same island. You begin to glimpse the lineaments of a plot, do you not? Or at least the love story angle of the plot.
Add Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, a roving sea dog who has survived being marooned on a tropical atoll and is now on the lookout for a new ship and pirate crew. Add, too, Geoffrey Rush as a pirate chief who sails on a cursèd ship, the Black Pearl of the title. He is Sparrow’s sworn enemy. Now you see the shape of the action part of the plot too.
And away we go. With a yo ho and so on, swinging from the rigging, brandishing a cutlass, and all that. The pace is that of a clipper ship in a howling gale, which is a good thing, because one barely has time to register any plot-holes, let alone ponder their significance. Instead, the viewer just gets swept along, with some laughs to help ease the passage between the spectacular action sequences.
The credit for the laughs must go largely to Depp. Knightley and Bloom are good-looking but somewhat bland, and Rush, for once, seems to be under-acting. It’s Depp’s show. As befits a character based on the Disney theme-park ride, his outfit would not disgrace a guest at a fancy-dress party (except for the grime, that is). Along with a dash of eyeliner, he wears a bandana over what looks like dreadlocks of some kind, with a beardlet in matching dreadlocks-with-beads style.
His performance is commensurately over-the-top — I don’t think I’ve seen so consciously odd a portrayal since Marlon Brando introduced the transvestite killer to the western genre in The Missouri Breaks. Brando all but derailed that movie, while Depp is the making of Pirates of the Caribbean. We’re not meant to take any of this seriously, anyway, or we’d worry about Depp’s curious rolling gait and/or the constant slippage of his accent, which seems Irish at one moment and verging on Australian the next. He is, at least, hilarious: he camps it up so outrageously that one expects him at any minute to rush below deck to roger a cabin-boy or two.
But this is a Disney movie, so it’s sexually neutered. We don’t see more than the odd V of flesh at the neck of an open shirt. The movie is so chaste you would have thought that the much-vaunted, and mocked, “pirate’s code” of which it speaks excludes raping from legitimate pirate activities. There isn’t even much blood, though a few sequences are rather blood-curdling in a cartoony sort of way.
This is no more of a grown-up movie than the animated Sinbad, also on circuit, with which Pirates of the Caribbean risks confusion. Nonetheless (and compared especially to its blockbuster competition of the allegedly comic Bruce Almighty kind) Pirates of the Caribbean is a reckless, relentless romp from start to finish. It doesn’t even feel like two and a quarter hours long. Buckle your swash, shiver your timbers, and set sail.