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| Tookey's Review |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
2007 |
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| Genre: |
ACTION
SWASHBUCKLER
ADVENTURE
SERIES
ROMANCE
SEQUEL
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
168 |
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It goes down with all hands.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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At least the Cutty Sark is probably salvageable. The eagerly awaited ?150 million blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean 3 proves to be beyond hope - the most depressing, expensive maritime disaster since the sinking of the Lusitania. It’s a big, bloated, bewildering bore.
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This third and worst of a promising trilogy has a script that’s too full of holes to be seaworthy. It takes far too many wrong turnings, and director Gore Verbinski evidently has no idea why he’s heading for the critical rocks.
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Every winning element in the first two movies has been thrown overboard. All that’s left is a plot of such head-scratching complexity that it makes the intricacies of Gordon Brown’s tax credits scheme look as easy to follow as the Teletubbies.
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The story has entirely lost what Gordo would call its moral compass. Characters change sides, betray their beliefs and even kill each other without our having the slightest idea of what they’re up to, or why.
Though some people found Pirates 2 hard to comprehend, it was possible to follow the plot, if you paid close attention. The story this time round is uninvolving, meaningless drivel. Lousy diction and over-enthusiastic sound effects don’t help.
At the start of the movie, nautical but nice Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, pictured right) has been killed by a kraken and sent to Davy Jones’s locker. This turns out to be anything but locked. It’s a surreal, desert-island, CGI-generated limbo containing multiple versions of Sparrow, thousands of crabs that look like stones, and Captain Jack’s old ship, the Black Pearl, miraculously made whole.
Our heroines, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) have gone to save him, with the aid of the puzzlingly alive-again Captain Barbarossa (Geoffrey Rush) and a piratical crew lent by a dodgy Chinaman (Chow Yun-Fat plus spectacular scar-tissue, pictured left).
One of the first problems is that we simply don’t know the rules governing Davy Jones’ locker. What are the crabs, and why are they helping Sparrow and his boat reach the ocean? Why is the Black Pearl back to perfect condition? Now that Captain Jack is dead, can he ever be killed again?
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Most worryingly of all, why are there multiple Depps, of differing sizes? Later on, well away from the locker, we shall see even more Depps appear, with even less plot logic – by then perhaps they’re meant to symbolise the Depps of our despair.
Following Captain Jack’s escape from the locker, there’s a period when the film is literally in the Doldrums. And, in a way, it never emerges from them. It’s as though the writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio thought the primary asset of the first two movies was its convoluted plot. Virtually the whole script of Pirates 3 consists of leaden exposition, and almost every bit of it is incomprehensible or unbelievable - usually both.
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Pirates 2 got away with the fact that the script wasn’t ready by the start of shooting, by virtue of good gags and goofy action. Pirates 3 isn’t so lucky. It’s glaringly obvious that the writers are making it up as they go along. And as for the love story…
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One of the reasons Pirates 2 worked on some kind of human scale was that Elizabeth Swann, though officially betrothed to handsome Will Turner, was secretly attracted to the wilder, freer but more unsanitary Jack Sparrow.
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This potentially entertaining love triangle was nicely set up, but goes for nothing in Pirates 3. The only reference to it comes around 10 minutes from the end, and gets a laugh of audience recognition.But why wasn’t it developed? As a result, there’s no chemistry between the three leads, and no romance, until way too late to save the movie.
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And, my dear, the performances! Bloom is so uninteresting, and uninterested, that he looks as if he’s modelling suntan products.
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Keira Knightley, who proved in Pride and Prejudice that she really can act, gives a truly horrible performance of pitiful shallowness. Her attempt to deliver a climactic, Henry V-style speech to her pirate fleet is an especially woeful embarrassment. She sounds like an ineffectual prefect at Benenden, and the wardrobe department makes her look like a little girl playing dress-up, with a tea cosy on her head.
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The main entertainment value of Pirates 2 lay in some outrageously camp, very funny stunts. Where have they gone? Here, there’s precisely one good, inventive action sequence – a marriage ceremony that takes place concurrently with a massive sea-battle – and it’s over two hours into a 168-minute movie. That’s about 115 minutes too late.
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The other highlight is the much-trailed cameo by Keith Richards as Sparrow’s dad. It gets the biggest laugh in the picture, but even he isn’t woven effectively into the plot.
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The whole film reeks of laziness and contempt for its audience. No one can even be bothered to tell us if the poor old kraken’s croaked. I suppose it has, or it would have resurfaced. I kept hoping that it might, if only to gobble everyone up and relieve the boredom.
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The first two films were enjoyably barmy. This one has entirely lost its moorings with reality. The East India Company seems able to murder an English governor and throw in its lot with a crew of fish-people led by a human octopus, without anyone at Head Office noticing, let alone complaining.
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We’re also meant to take it on trust that pirates are freedom-loving guys with a lovably anarchic streak. Gone is any idea that they are predators, or doing anything anti-social. Becoming a pirate is now, essentially, a fashion choice. No wonder the whole film seems weightless, thoughtless, pointless.
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Pirates 3 ends with the survivors setting out in pursuit of the fountain of youth. On this sorry evidence, they would be better advised to consider early retirement.
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I know, I know. The film will be a big hit. But it won’t deserve to be. It’s a a ?150 million rip-off. And the trusting public who pays to sit through this tedious tosh will have every right to feel extremely mutinous.
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, Keira Knightley 