Common Sense

Damnit! I have to wait until next summer to see what happens next. Damn you Disney!
Having seen the orginal just last week, I was up on all my pirating and the characters seemed much more familiar than if there had been a lot of time between them (great idea that viewing party was). Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest pick right up where Curse left off… almost. A couple of months have passed and we find a soaking wet Elizabeth sitting in the rain on her wedding day. Both she and Will are being arrested for their help in setting Captain Jack Sparrow free in the first movie. I don’t know about Keira Knightley, but Oralndo Bloom should certainly be arrested for his performance in the first film.

That leads me directly to one of the things I really liked about this film is that the character of Will Turner is different. He is not the bumbling, nerdy wannabe pirate anymore. There is definitely some maturity to the character now, he’s learned some hard lessons it seems.

It’s as though his adventure with Jack and his pending nuptials have made him a bit more worldly. He’s much more cunning this time around, and much more ready to take charge when things are going bad. I like this new Will Turner. And I don’t know if it is the art department, the wardrobe or what, but Bloom doesn’t look like a scrawny 14-year-old with a badly-grown goatee anymore, either. Kudos for that.

Keira Knightley, she is quite the commanding actress. She spends the entire first act behind bars, but somehow becomes almost a second protagonist. It’s also interesting how Elizabeth spends much of this movie wearing men’s clothes, but still uses her sex to get what she wants.

That’s another segue into our main character, and what he has. Do you remember the compass from the first movie? Well, the reason Will and Elizabeth have been arrested is because an agent of the Dutch East India Trading Company wants that compass, and more importantly what it can lead him to. The compass shows you where the thing you want most is. In the first movie, that happened to be the Black Pearl. One of Jack’s two problems in this movie is he doesn’t know what he really wants and it causes him to lose direction in life… and as a pirate.

His crew is getting antsy over the prospect of just going around the ocean, without course or heading and without purpose. Jack’s second problem is that his time is up, literally. Bootstrap Bill Turner, Will’s father and former crewmate of Jack Sparrow (ably played by Stellan Skarsgard, who redeems himself for those Exorcist movies) has returned from the briny deep to tell Jack that it has been 13 years since Davy Jones raised the Pearl from the bottom of the ocean and made him captain, so now he has to join the crew of the Flying Dutchman for 100 years of service.

Understandably, Jack isn’t too thrilled at the prospect. He orders his crew to make for land. As in beach his beloved Pearl to avoid having it destroyed by Jones’ pet, the mythological Krakken.

Will is released from jail to go find Sparrow and the compass, Elizabeth busts herself out of jail to go find Will and Jack is stuck on an island with cannibals. All will go on the same quest: To find the dead man’s chest containing the heart of Davy Jones.

When I went to see this, I wasn’t under the illusion that Johnny Depp is the second coming of Gregory Peck from To Kill A Mockingbird. This was about fun; this was about what made Captain Blood and other pirate movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age so great. We have amazing sword-fighting sequences choreographed to within an inch of their lives, we have a gorgeous leading lady, we have adventure, we have subtext and we have a musical score that we cannot get out of our heads.

The pressure was on Bruckheimer and Verbinksi this time around. The first movie was sort of a happy accident, no one was sure why they liked a movie based on the laughable premise of a theme park ride. This movie is something of a happy coincidence. I loved it, but I don’t know why exactly. The movie is greater than the sum of its parts (the greatest part being Depp) and well deserving of the highest honor I have yet bestowed on a movie: I give it 5 out of 5 Jolly Rogers.

There’s much more after the jump, including spoilers and some of my pet peeves from the movie.

SPOILERS! YE BE WARNED!

First off, yes I love the movie, but there were some things that just didn’t sit right with me.

The most glaring is the fact that everyone just accepts the weird crewmembers of the Flying Dutchman as being real. The first movie, no one could possibly believe that a bunch of undead pirates were stalking ships in the Caribbean. Now, ‘of course there’s a ship of the damned.’

I was also thrown a bit by the Krakken attack scenes. There are three of them, and each one seems like it is not up to par with the rest of the visual elements. The CGI work on Davy Jones was spectacular, so why was Depp standing in front of a blue screen with a nature film being projected on it? That’s what it looked like, a PBS special on the giant squid or something.

There were a lot of things in that scene I didn’t like, actually. The dialogue Depp has just seems like over-the-top hero stuff that doesn’t fit with his character. And he just found a damn clever way to save himself, yet again, and then he jumps into the Krakken’s mouth?

The good thing about that scene is the kiss Elizabeth uses to shackle Sparrow to the mast. I don’t know who to feel more jealous of: Keira for getting to make out with a superstar like Johnny Depp, or Depp for getting to make out with such a hottie like Keira Knightley.

I don’t like where the thread was going with Will and Elizabeth at the end. I mean, she was going to marry you Will, big freakin’ deal if she gave Jack a last kiss before he died. He’s dead now anyway. I can’t help but feel as though they are going to carry that line much further in the next film and I don’t want to see that. It is unnecessary drama to create some kind of extra conflict to fill the 3-hour runtime.

What’s with all the island hopping in this movie? Aren’t the supposed to be in the Caribbean? Then it seems rather odd that one of the islands is Bora Bora and is filled with cannibals. The Black Pearl seems to be able to sail across the entire Atlantic in a day. All that sailing around and no actual pirating. I have yet to see Captain Jack Sparrow steal anything more than a ring or a bag of coins.

Speaking of the ring, Space Monkey thinks that the reason Jack can be found and rescued from the end of the world is because of the ring he stole from Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris, who is also in the Miami Vice movie coming out this summer). I think he stole the ring because he’s a pirate and he steals things. We shall see who is right.

And I’ve just spoiled the plot of the third installment. Jack’s dead, the Pearl is gone and our crew of misfits is sailing under a new captain to the end of the world to find both. Shades of Empire Strikes Back. Will is wounded after seeing his father in such pain (and for seeing his soon-to-be wife kissing another man), the captain is encased in carbonite (carbonite, Krakken what’s the dif?) and the Millenium Falcon is being piloted by someone new. Have I got you confused?

The point of this movie is to set up the next movie, which is always a pain. I can see why Alexandra Dupont compared it to the Matrix sequels, but they are definitely not that bad. At least when Bruckheimer and Verbinksi go for epic, they achieve it. The Wachowski brothers just tend to piss me off by showing the same two streets over and over again and try to play that all off as lower Manhattan or something.

I guess my last gripe is the duel scene at the end between Jack, Will and the ex-commondore Norrington (who is now a pirate). A three-way duel, all master swordsman… and nobody gets hurt. I mean, come on. Not a cut, not a bruise, it is just so unrealistic. This is such a spectacular duel, I can’t believe no one even lost a finger. It takes me right out of the movie to see it an realize it could never happen in real life.
Even with all of this, I still give it a 5 out of 5 rating, so you know it will be fun. Go, see it for yourself.

If you stayed this long and read this far, you must really want to know about that cliffhanger ending and that Lando Calrissian I mentioned earlier. It’s… the dog from the jail. He’s just crazy and just mangy enough for it to work! Actually, it is a big one and if you really want to know before you go see the movie, just email me and I’ll tell you. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who doesn’t want to know. I will tell you that if you wait through the credits (the long-ass credits that take 15 minutes) you will find out that the dog is the new chief of the cannibals.