Yar—ya call that a movie?
A conversation with my friend Josh upon leaving Pirates of the Caribbean last night:
Me: Hmm…so evidently pirates weren’t that bad after all!
Josh: Yeah, they were more like a peacekeeping force!
When I first heard about Pirates, I had absolutely no interest in seeing it, since it smelled of summer blockbusterism and (worse) corporate synergy. Then I started to hear wonderful things about Johnny Depp’s performance (Entertainment Weekly described it memorably as a channeling of Captain Morgan and Keith Richards) and I began to warm up to it. Combine that with the soft spot I’ve had for pirate material since I first encountered Alan Moore’s brilliant comic-within-a-comic, Tales of the Black Freighter (in his magum opus Watchmen), and I was ready to give Disney the benefit of the doubt.
The results were fairly predictable: the movie is a hell of a lot of fun as long as Johnny Depp is on screen, but the moment it shifts its focus away from Captain Jack it becomes fairly tedious. Orlando Bloom’s character is a complete bore, Geoffrey Rush has much less to sink his teeth into than you would expect, and the movie itself could have used a bit more time in the cutting room. Oh—and the ending is extremely weak.
My recommendation: rent it on DVD.