|
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest July 16, 2006 |
||
|
Why do they always have to go and ruin a good thing? There we were in the summer of 2003, a few good movies under our belt, “Finding Nemo”, “X-Men 2” and so forth, with your standard garbage, “The Hulk”, “Gigli” whatnot thrown in to balance the equation, when along came this strange movie about pirates based on, of all things, a theme park ride at Disney World, that turned what was an average season into an unexpectedly positive one, thanks in part to a memorable turn from Johnny Depp as a slurry speeched buccaneer, an impossibly beautiful young heroine in old timey costumes, and a spirit borne, with the help of some expensive computer effects, right out of Errol Flynn’s swashbuckling legend. “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” was indeed a surprise hit three years ago, and a legitimate one, given that it’s offbeat humor, well suited cast, hilarious, would be Oscar nominated lead performance, detailed set pieces, and powerful Disney marketing campaign was perfectly situated for early July, when the season is ripe for a non-sequel or non-remake (you can’t remake a theme park ride, can you?) to throw a bit of originality our way, which it did, and thusly rewarded dice-throwing Disney execs (140 million dollars adapting a boat ride?) with a nice fat bonus, and a final haul of 300 mil plus. All was well in the summer of 2003 with ‘Pirates’, everybody seemed to win; critics got something original that seemed to hearken back to the days of Warner Brothers swashbucklers, teenage girls got a new heartthrob in Orlando Bloom, women’s magazines got a new beauty for their covers in Keira Knightly, Disney got another few more dollars for their vast coffers, and Johnny Depp was able to broaden his string of camp, uniquely troubled leading roles to the friendly confines of the mainstream (something his Hunter S. Thompson in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” never quite reached), but you had to know with a monster hit like that that a sequel or two would be just around the corner, and here we are, three years later with “Dead Man’s Chest”, and the fun is gone. The characters are the same, don’t get me wrong, Depp is still doing his Keith Richards meets Marilyn Manson meets W. C. Fields meets Captain Kidd thing, Bloom is still dashing, Knightly is still pretty, and the costumes are still old timey and puffy, but the spirit is no longer willing, beaten down by expectation, an ungodly and uninteresting new villain that pushes the limits of how ugly computer effects can make an actor look, and a simple loss of what made the first film so good, a spot on knack for rebelliousness and anarchic comedy. This thing may have shattered records in it’s opening weekend, but it’s a gloomy mess, and I for one can faintly hear the sound of Disney bigwigs laughing their way to pay dirt, over my own sighs of frustration and disappointment. Rather than continue down the path of your typical negative review, with the standard plot details and blind quotations, I’ve devised a handy five point critique as to why this mega blockbuster had me so thoroughly annoyed, and yet so happy that I didn’t pay one red cent to contribute to it’s massive gross (hooray critic’s passes). 1. Davy Jones is a creep: The new villain in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” is a recreation of the famed pirate Davy Jones, who in the brilliant conception of the producers, is here unearthed as a slave master Lucifer of the seas, commandeering any pirate who will pledge his soul, in exchange for a favor, and then when payment is due, turn the poor buccaneer, slowly, over 100 years of backbreaking under seas servitude, into a hideous fish monster. Jack Sparrow (Depp) is one of these deal making pirates who signed a clause with Jones, and one of the film’s vast plot machinations is that it’s time for him to make good on his pact, thus creating a cat-and-mouse (pirate-and-sea beast) subplot between our funny hero Jack, and the creepy new villain, which somehow comes to involve Will Turner (Bloom), his dead father Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), and an enormous, frightening, man-eating, ship destroying, CGI created, ultra octopus that is every bit as off putting and unpleasant as the tentacled puss of Davy Jones and his band of ugly sea mutants. The villain of the first film, Barbossa, played to immaculate bag guy perfection by the talented Geoffrey Rush, was only slightly a digital creation, as when the full moon turned him into a decaying skeleton, but Jones is almost entirely fake (actor Bill Nighy has the thankless job of voicing this abominable water monster), so it’s hard to appreciate the wickedness of a character you just can’t find at all realistic, let alone believe, like the script wants us to, that he was some kind of broken-hearted romantic that, dig this, carved out his own beating heart (which serves as the MacGuffin in the titular chest), when his lady love was killed, or something to that effect. An action-adventure epic can succeed only when it’s villain is as memorable as it’s hero, and poor lovelorn Davy Jones is a resounding dud of a bad guy, and he and his monster octopus quite literally sink this film under the weight of their flopping, computer generated tentacles. 2. The curse of Sequelitis: Sequelitis is a common term used to describe the strains a script goes through to try and differentiate a new franchise picture from it’s predecessor, often failing because standard formula is just too hard to write your way out of. In ‘Dead Man’s Chest’, everything reminds us of the first film, and because it’s so overblown here, it doubles the pain of Sequelitis to an inhuman level of ridiculousness and unoriginality. There are many examples, from the numerous escape scenes, to the love-hate partnership between Will and Jack, but the worst instance comes from an obligatory trip to the pirate haven of Tortuga, where everyone is always drunk, loud, obnoxious, fighting, pillaging, and plundering, as if the pirate’s life leaves nothing more to be desired than rum, prostitutes, and good old fashioned fist fights. You’ll see more civility and honor in Al Swearengen’s Gem Saloon on “Deadwood” than you will on Tortuga, and even though it’s all in good fun, the scene is no different, and certainly no more important to the expansive plot, than it was in the first film, where it served to get us to know Jack Sparrow away from the Pearl, where he’s less a pirate God, and more a bumbling drunkard, though the pirate God angle might only apply in his head anyway. A suggestion for ‘Pirates 3’ next summer: no more unnecessary layovers in Tortuga, it was funny in film one, and pointless in film two, if you want to avoid the dreaded curse of Sequelitis, please come up with some new material, any more drunken pirate revelry would be overkill, and then some. 3. Will and Liz are about as exciting as unbuttered toast: Jack Sparrow is a fun enough character, and Johnny Depp’s portrayal of the mascara wearing, selfishly shallow scallywag is still a hoot, but Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly’s lovers-in-peril, who open the film ripped apart on their wedding day for helping Jack escape at the end of part one, are no longer romantic or interesting, they’re just dull, pretty faces to ground the story in some kind of non-pirate, non-hideous sea monster humanity. I have nothing against the actors, especially Knightly, who is every bit as glamorous as Olivia de Havilland was in the old Errol Flynn masterpieces, but do we really need a subplot where a jealous Will misunderstands a kiss between Jack and Elizabeth as an unspeakable, love shattering, act of infidelity, a melancholy cloud of unnecessary gloom that will undoubtedly lead to melodramatic entanglements in part three? Of course all good epics need drama, but Elizabeth Swann is no Scarlett O’Hara, and Will Turner, with his thin, unflattering mustache, is certainly no Rhett Butler, though I could make a comparison between megalomaniac, spend happy producers David O. Selznick and Jerry Bruckheimer, but that would be too many references to “Gone With the Wind”, which just makes me feel dirty whispering the two in the same breath. 4. Seriously, cannibals? The first major set piece of the film takes place on a tropical island where a marooned Jack Sparrow is abducted by a clan of cannibals who think he’s some kind of spiritual prophet, with whom it is their destiny to cook and devour. The action sets in motion when Will arrives and frees the Pearl’s crew from a hanging prison (one of the few genuinely entertaining scenes in the film), while Jack has to escape his eventual fate at the end of a tribesman’s fork. There is much low brow comedy here concerning the rather unfunny topic of cannibalism - Sparrow is given a human toe, which he chews on inexplicably; a tribesman stares blankly at a tied-up Sparrow, his knife and fork poised for action; Jack douses himself, in pure slapstick fashion, with cooking seasoning to suggest compliance in the disgusting deeds; and after the humans escape, a stray dog becomes the secondary target of the tribe – and the borderline racist caricatures of the tribes people don’t help a bit. Is this really what Disney (and fellow shill McDonalds) want in a franchise, Johnny Depp chewing on a big toe, and the suggestion of an imminent murder, and devouring of a helpless stray dog? Nice family fun, that. 5. Film as parody of itself, times two: This final criticism, which goes hand in hand with Sequelitis, is the most damning critique I can come up with without actually cursing the filmmakers as hacks and sell outs (I’d never do that), because it simply states that, after one 300 million dollar success, the best Disney, director Gore Verbinski, and a smattering of computer effects technicians and backroom story editors can come up with is a lame parody of what made the franchise work in the first place, where the jokes are the same, the story is a convoluted paste job, the characters receive little to no further development, and the ending, “surprise” as it may be, is as unforgivable as the previous 130 minutes of gloomy nothingness. What’s worse, it’ll all happen again in 11 months when “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” hits 2007 summer theaters, and that’ll probably make even more money, suggesting that, indeed, the apocalypse is at hand, and as many could have predicted, it comes at the feet of a powerful corporation like Disney, where family values come hand in fist with wads and wads of cold, green moolah. I don’t know what’s more shameful, that the cannibalism escapades of the first half of the film are repeated, almost to a tee, in the second half, with Davy Jones as the culprit, and a beating heart as the catalyst instead of a potential human-eating-human session, or that we’re supposed to swallow this tripe as some kind of epic bridge between a lightweight, and very funny, beginning, and a monumental (“At World’s End”? Melodramatic, anyone?) conclusion of the next all time great screen trilogy. I’m not buying it, but honestly, when so many people apparently are, does that even matter? Yo-Ho-Ho, and a bottle of aspirin. “Pirates of the Caribbean” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59.
by Adam Suraf
|