Not long ago, I said I hated the Jerry Bruckheimer approach to filmmaking, and now, having seen the second sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl entitled POTC: At World's End, I can emphatically reiterate this sentiment.
The movie embodies so many of the things that I hate about a Bruckheimer production, from the eyeball-searing special effects to the overbearing music score to the ludicrous dialogue, this time taking the form of clumsy "inspirational" speeches delivered by a truly uncharismatic actor (Keira Knightley). If I had heard her say "our enemies" one more time I swear I would have thrown something at the projector.
I write this review as someone who genuinely enjoyed the first POTC movie and even its sequel, Dead Man's Chest. Both of those films, the first much more than the second, had a sense of fun driving them. The beauty of the first film really hit me upon repeat viewings: it had all the proper ingredients of a good action adventure movie: an engaging plot, a truly despicable villian, a charismatic lead character, and a plucky, beautiful heroine. Of course, the key ingredient, without which everything else is useless, is a well-woven narrative. The movie fails in this respect, and everything else comes tumbling down. It's a chop-suey of iconic visuals that have no real emotional impact, mainly because they feel like parts from different movies thrown together.
The opening scene, where several people, including a young boy, are hanged for aiding pirates, with its somber lighting and grim music score, is a potentially powerful scene...that belongs in another movie, not one that's supposed to be fun. Clearly, the intent is to establish the villain, Cutler Beckett, as a badass, a fearsome adversary, but in truth and in fact it just does not have the desired effect. From start to finish, he is incurably bland. The sad thing is that this is not the only scene that feels sorely out of place in this film, because in a lot of ways the movie does not even seem to know what it is, with its mishmash of jokes, murder, mayhem and bad "Braveheart" speeches. If Keira Knightley's condition for coming back to the series was that the writers churn out these prosaic "we must fight" speeches for her, then I frankly hope her clout in Hollywood diminishes greatly over the next few years.
I won't even go into the specifics of the chaotic plot, other than there seems to be some kind of ham-handed allegory as to how corporate capitalism, as represented by the East India Trading Company, is bad, while independent, free enterprise as represented by the pirates, is good, or something like that. Everything else is a hopeless mess.
The film does have its redeeming moments, such as all of Johnny Depp's screentime. Although his sashaying drunkard does get old at some point, it's still head and shoulders more enjoyable than most other things in the film. Geoffrey Rush, who played the campy pirate villain to perfection in the first movie is here considerably less menacing but nonetheless a welcome addition to a mostly uninspired cast. He does his fair share of scenery chewing, and is easily the most "piratey" of the bunch.
Although done to excess, the digital effects are still topnotch. The last act was good for the most part though they really tended to go overboard (no pun intended). Still, on the top of visual effects achievements, one of my biggest, and I mean literally BIGGEST pet peeves was how the writers killed the Kraken, the gigantic squid that dragged the Black Pearl and Captain Jack into Davy Jones' locker at the end of the second film, OFF CAMERA. The once fearsome beast shows up here only as an enormous carcass washed up on land. What an anticlamactic end to such a magnificent movie monster. I don't know if they were trying to save money on the effects they would need to animate it or were just too unimaginative to think of how else it could have been killed (they had a sea goddess, for crying out loud, who could probably have dispatched it easily). The climactic whirlpool scene was indeed breathtaking, although the classic Bruckheimer overkill pops up again and again.
The biggest problem with this movie was that it didn't keep things simple, the way the first one did. As with its box-office rival, Spider-Man 3, its makers tried to cram too many things into one movie, and when one thinks about it there were just so many narrative dead-ends that the film could certainly have done without, particularly the proliferation of double-crossing.
Well, the box-office verdict is mostly in, and it appears that this installment of POTC, largely expected to smash Spider-Man 3's opening weekend record, fell short. While I wasn't too thrilled with Spider-Man 3, this is still good news to me because for all its flaws, Spider-Man 3 was still better than this piece of crap. At least that movie's beating heart was the story itself, rather than a prosaic, ill-conceived story device created so Orlando Bloom could utter hideous lines like "it's always belonged to you."
With apparently all three of the 2007 summer's big threequels being huge disappointments, I hope Hollywood learns a very important lesson about market saturation...
...ah, who are we kidding?
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