PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN :
THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL

6/10

USA 2003 : Gore VERBINSKI : 143 mins

As lengthy and unwieldy as its double-mouthful title, this tongue-in-cheek swashbuckler is like being stuck a dungeon with a rum-sozzled old seadog who can’t stop spinning tall tales of seaborne skullduggery. There’s enough entertainment, laughs and boisterous derring-do to keep any audience absorbed, even if the story is sloppily told, repetitive, incoherent, repetitive, long-winded, and repetitive.

The plot is basically some nonsense about a golden uber-trinket, pursued by undead seafarers under the command of bad pirate Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) - standing in their way are good(ish) pirate Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and plucky lovebirds Will (Orlando Bloom*) and Elizabeth (Keira Knightley). Briny chaos ensues.

The outrageously OTT Depp keeps things afloat pretty much single-handed – though he’s claimed his performance to be a Keith Richards tribute, there’s also plenty of the mid-60s Peter O’Toole in his hammy, perpetually half-cut improvisations. Verbinski, meanwhile – as in The Mexican and The Ring - is hardly the steadiest hand on the tiller, ensuring this vessel lurches and lists alarmingly over the course of its protracted voyage – buoyed along by a script (by Shrek scribes Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio, and “based on” a Walt Disney theme-park ride) that gleefully sends up every last corny cliché of the half-remembered, long-submerged pirate genre.

It’s very hard, however, to knock a film that contains (at least) three amusing nods to John Carpenter’s The Fog, and whose nifty, hyperkinetic visuals include some striking horror-movie-inspired images (classily realised by cinematographer Darius Wolski and FX co-ordinator John Knoll) - including a spectacular underwater march-of-the-zombies that is, to paraphrase Mark E Smith, a genuine ‘tenebral ocean-bed achievement.’

5th August, 2003
(seen same day : Warner Village, Leeds)

*anagram : Blando Orloom

by Neil Young

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