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Movie Review by:
Jim "Good Old JR" Rutkowski
Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Written by:
Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie
Starring: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley
Running time: 145 minutes,
Released: 07/07/06.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of adventure violence, including
frightening images. |
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 Epics
come about by necessity. The material demands it. A story is
too big and too grand to contain within the usual
boundaries, and so an epic is born. "The Lord of the Rings,"
for example, became an epic film trilogy because its story
could only be told in that form. Epics don't come about
through sheer willpower, by someone deciding to make an epic
and then stuffing a weak story with a lot of junk. Do that
and you don't get an epic, just cinematic water torture on
the order of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest."
This second installment in the "Pirates" trilogy is more
than the usual bad or even numbingly horrible movie. It's an
amalgam of many of the modern cinema's worst tendencies and
modern filmmaking's most unfortunate misconceptions. The
film has an epic scale without an epic story, epic
characters, epic ideas or epic emotions. The conversations
are without wit and often without purpose. Much of the
acting consists of mugging and empty gestures. Scenes are
stretched out for no reason but to give the illusion of
importance, so that the story is buried under rubble. Worst
of all, director Gore Verbinski doesn't seem to understand
the difference between motion and action. He is more traffic
cop than film director.
It's an important difference. Motion is just violence and
tumult happening onscreen. Action is violence and tumult
that actively advances the story. Of recent movies,
"Mission: Impossible III" has motion, while Peter Jackson's
"King Kong" mostly consists of action scenes. In "Pirates,"
whenever there's a battle, or a fight, or a chase scene, the
story comes to a dead stop while the filmmakers devise
clever, active ways for absolutely nothing to happen. The
slightest incident is pumped up into a 10- or 15-minute
segment. In one scene, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp)
has to escape from native islanders who want to use him in a
ritual sacrifice. The movie has one inventive stunt (he's
attached to a pole and finds himself stuck between two
mountains), but by the time that stunt arrives, its moment
has long past.
As Captain Jack the Pirate, Depp seems to have lost some of
the Keith Richards swagger that he had in the first
installment, but he's still game and willing to mug his way
through the picture. That's fine. The problem is that he has
nowhere to take the character -- it's a self-contained dead
end -- while the filmmakers seem to have decided, this time
out, to take Captain Jack seriously. It does Depp no justice
to take the amusing caricature he's created and try to give
it a complicated moral nature. Observe how uncomfortable,
how torn in two directions Depp looks in his heart-to-heart
conversations with Keira Knightley, as he tries to play a
scene and remain Captain Jack at the same time.
The story is an intentional tangle designed not to be untied
until the end of the third installment, which arrives next
year. Elizabeth (Knightley) and Will (Orlando Bloom) are
about to be married when they're arrested for having
sheltered Captain Jack from the authorities. Will is
temporarily released on the condition that he find Captain
Jack and retrieve a special compass. If he succeeds, he and
Elizabeth will be free.
Meanwhile, Jack is in pursuit of a ghost ship, led by Davy
Jones (Bill Nighy), who has an octopus-like face with
sensitive tentacles and feelers. He heads a handsome crew
that includes a hammer-headed officer and Stellan Skarsgard
as Will's father, who has rubbery barnacles growing on his
face. Imagine the torment for a sensitive soul, to be forced
to sail for all eternity with costume rejects from "Star
Trek."
The lead actors are not to be blamed. Bloom, a popular
whipping boy of late, makes a fine, vigorous young leading
man, and Knightley has the great advantage of intelligence.
She brings an alert energy to her scenes, but most of the
time she's the only alert thing in them. Ted Elliott and
Terry Rossio's script is torturous. When characters have
nothing to say to each other, they write them fake-clever
banter in which they still say nothing, but leer and smirk
while doing so. Purely functional scenes, as when a witch (Naomie
Harris) imparts necessary plot information, are stretched
beyond the snapping point. Do we need to be taken into the
witch's inner sanctum? Do we need to see that she has blue
teeth, and is that a style choice or a product placement for
Bluetooth technology?
Everything is an occasion for a scene. So when a long boat
approaches an island, the movie doesn't cut to show the
characters having arrived. Instead, we're treated to an
interlude of meaningless banter between two rustics dragging
the boat to shore, as though Elliott and Rossio were
Shakespeare and these were the grave diggers in "Hamlet."
The inescapable conclusion to reach is that the goal was to
make a long movie. But that goal is simply incompatible with
also making good movie. Good long movies are long because
they have to be. They're not made of air. |
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PIRATES OF
THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST © 2006 Buena Vista Pictures
Distribution
All Rights Reserved
Review © 2006 Alternate Reality, Inc. |
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