Dead Man’s chest came out while this blog was on hiatus, so let’s get it out of the way: it was one of the best movies last year. Incredibly fun, imaginative, smart and perversely unpredictable, it also had that elusive quality movie theorists like to call balls – making it all the more unbelievable it had come from the toxic bowels of both Disney and Jerry Bruckenheimer. It was shot concurrently with the third part of the (so far) trilogy, and has spent most of the year since in post production. (Judging by the end product, the script was written during that time too, but more on that later)
So it’s fair to say my expectations ran very high, especially after watching the excellent trailer (a cannon fight OVER A FUCKING MAELSTROM- holy fucking shit!) It’s also fair to say the final film not only didn’t live up to its promise, it’s also a crap movie on its own right. Messy and lackluster in almost every respect, it manages to miss everything the previous installments nailed just right, and indulges in their worst excesses.
The plot, such as it is, follows the rescue of Jack Sparrow from the land of the dead (or Davey Jones locker), pirate politics, and the subsequent showdown between pirates and the forces of modernism and civilization. It also tries, but not too hard, to tie up the impossibly high number of loose ends from Dead Man’s Chest. Sounds exiting, right? Well, looks like it didn’t to anyone involved, so they spent more time thinking up wacky stuff for Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow than developing the script.
I mean hell, I like Jack Sparrow as much as anyone else- his first entry in Pirates of the Caribbean is probably the best character introductions since the Dude Lebowski - but it was always understood that it needed to be dosed carefully… well, until this film, that is. They’ve got Geoffrey Rush as Barbossa – a great character that could easily drive the whole movie if they needed a main character, (and remember Dead Man's Chest didn't, through skillful storyline juggling) but he’s relegated here to be the straight man for gags that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out were improvised by a stoned Johnny Depp. And when he’s not providing angry reaction shots, he’s spewing important-sounding bullshit to cover up for plot holes. Actually, that describes most of the dialog in the movie. But it’s that kind of careless pandering to audiences that sinks the flick; save for the first few minutes it feels, and this wasn't the case in any of its prequels, like Disney and Bruckenheimer had an active voice in it. It feels like a committee movie.
So we get an overdose of all things Sparrow, but unfunny. We get lame slapstick and gags that are taken just a bit too long- Just count the number of animal reaction shots or cutesy gimmicks like Jack’s father. We also get characters we couldn’t give a shit about and major plot elements that are pulled out of nowhere (and that are dropped before they go anywhere) – and that might be the most puzzling thing in this movie; I mean, I could understand it on the second one, it was a sequel to a movie that didn’t really leave room for one, but for fuck’s sake- these last two were written at the same time! A couple of major plot lines not only don’t really make sense, they also turn out to be completely unnecessary and are forgotten and left unresolved halfway through. And forget about character attachment- they are either too busy explaining the plot dramatically enough to fool people, or making decisions which are so random one wonders if they’re not rolling dice to see what they do next.
What the hell happened? I can take a couple of guesses. Dead Man’s chest began with a crow pecking out a corpse’s eyes, and it’s a smart, complex film. I can see how that would give a Disney exec a heart attack, and lead to the studio forcing their standards on Verbinski and the scriptwriters to make this piece of shit under legal threat.
Time is also undoubtedly a factor here- either all the good stuff was left on Dead Man’s Chest, or the two-films at a time thing was all a hoax and this movie was indeed written and made in this last year or so. I could also blame CGI, I dunno. (It would explain Orlando bloom, at least…)
Finally, it could be that Verbinski and Co. fucked up. It could happen.
There are some saving graces to the movie. It’s telling it has striking images which display an incredible visual imagination. (Which I’d attribute to Verbinski; most of them are shamefully squandered in the trailer) It’s also worth noting that unlike in the previous two installments, where a sequence would start being amazing and end up being stunning through unexpected developments and wit, here they fall through almost instantaneously without a script to prop them up.
I also liked that a theme running subtly through the previous movie was picked up and pushed to the forefront- that the positive aspects of piracy, the freedom, mysteriousness and adventure of it are only possible at the fringes of civilization; it’s hammered home too soon, too often and too obviously, and it’s also lifted directly from some of the best westerns, but hey- I still like it.
And whoever thought of the whole worthless oriental angle (poor Chow Yun Fat is woefully underused- this movie demanded full on wuxia action, dammit!) still deserves a raise, simply because it allowed them to cram Keira Knightley into all sorts of tight oriental costumes.
But yeah, all in all, it sucks pretty bad.