The 10 Minute Review: Pirates of the Caribbean

Who doesn’t enjoy reviews? Who doesn’t love to pick up the newspaper and see the columns of exhaustive, heartfelt, intellectual analysis of our favorite films? And who, really, bothers to read the entirety of any of these things? There’s a reason that the entire review can be summed up by a combination of the first and last sentences, and — in case you’re not even interested enough to digest more than fifty words — by arcane symbols like thumbs or stars or movie reels or dollar signs or something.

But since I couldn’t come up with a rating system that hasn’t already been done, done again, copyrighted and trademarked, I’ve decided to dedicate exactly the same amount of time to reviewing things that I dedicate to actually thinking about them. And so I offer the Ten Minute Review –conceived, written and delivered in ten minutes flat.

This could be my shortest review ever, because I can only think of one thing to say: Go and see Pirates of the Caribbean.

Yeah, okay, you’ve seen the commercials or the previews and you haven’t been impressed. Johnny Depp sounds like he’s doped up on quaaludes, Orlando Bloom looks surprisingly dull as the lead swashbuckler, and you can’t even really be sure that this isn’t a movie for people half or even one-quarter of your age.

But it’s got pirates! They swash buckles! They have swordfights! They shoot rifles and cannons! They slit throats! Right in front of you! I was not expecting to see people having their throats slit!

Above left: Kiera Knightley strives to perfect her impersonation of Natalie Portman.
Above right: Natalie Portman strives to perfect her impersonation of a lump of wood.

As a matter of fact, I was expecting to see something geared towards the twelve-to-fourteen year-old set, since that’s really the only market that Hollywood hasn’t aimed a pirate movie in recent memory. Muppet Treasure Island and Treasure Planet have safely secured the bottom end, Dora the Explorer crowd; Cutthroat Island was the last vain attempt to win over the older, heaving-bosoms-loving adult audience. It only made sense that someone would make a sanitized attempt for the middle-teen audience, a group whose awareness of pirates stems almost entirely from internet debates about whether they’re cooler than ninjas.

There are signs that it started that way, actually. There’s a pair of bumbling British naval officers, and another pair of bumbling pirates, who point to a script that featured more slapstick idiocy and less throat-slitting. But as you watch Pirates of the Caribbean, you get the feeling that it was a film that was saved during its revisions, rather than watered down. It’s light, it’s funny and it depicts pirates the way movies should, in the same category as cowboys or Robin Hood’s Merry Men — filthy, dishonest and occasionally brutal, but not so unpleasant that you don’t end up thinking they’re cool at the end.

It hits just the right note, the one that Cutthroat Island was groping for but never really found. Pirates of the Caribbean seems to realize that the fun of pirates is that they’re colorful scoundrels, Yoda-talking liars and tricksters and thieves who are way more interesting than their clean-cut, Horatio Hornblower-type enemies. The challenge that it — and every other pirate movie — has had to face is the unfortunate reality of pirates: the raping, the murdering, the looting and the pillaging. Simply confining such atrocities to off-screen action is hardly acceptable to contemporary audiences, and so other approaches must be tested: Roman Polanski tried to laugh it up using Walter Matthau; Renny Harlin tried to sex it up using Geena Davis; Jim Henson tried to soften it up using Muppets.

Gore Verbinski, drawing on his experience from last year’s The Ring, tries to scare it up, using undead pirates. Rendered zombies by an Aztec Curse, the villains of Pirates of the Caribbean are conveniently devoid of most of the usual pirate appetites, trapped forever in an unfeeling void that neither rape nor plunder can satisfy. Instead, they sail the ocean in search of a cure for their curse, laying waste to any place that might hold a clue to their salvation.

Caught up in the middle of all this are Will Turner, Elizabeth Swann and Captain Jack Sparrow, a trio that are disgusted, turned on and completely consumed by piracy. As the romantic lead, Orlando Bloom has the good sense not to let his adventuresome Turner distract the audience even momentarily from Johnny Depp as Sparrow, who plays his character as a slightly drunk, possibly insane, probably brilliant and surprisingly dangerous rogue. Somewhere in between these two stands Kiera Knightley’s Swann, the plucky governor’s daughter and all-around pirate fangirl, who unfortunately isn’t interesting enough to distract you from her alarming resemblance to, alternately, Natalie Portman and Winona Ryder.

Above: A visitor to Disney world enjoys the new Pirates of the Caribbean: Slitting Your Throat With Flavor cross-promotion between Disney and Long John Silver’s.

Happily, it doesn’t matter. Pirates of the Caribbean is light enough that you won’t even mind whispering to the person next to you about how Kiera Knightley looks like two other mediocre actresses. It wants you to have fun with it. It wants you to make a drinking game out of it, if you want to — it wants to you drink like a robot once every time Kiera resembles Natalie Portman; it wants you to covertly shoplift a drink from someone else every time she looks like Winona Ryder; it wants you to chug every time she looks like the alien love child of both of them.

Most importantly, it wants you to have fun. Pirates of the Caribbean is probably the first movie this summer that doesn’t take itself all that seriously, avoiding the confused gravity of Hulk and the rote mechanics of Charlie’s Angels II. There’re goofy pirates sharing long exchanges of stupid dialogue, but there’s also creepy skeletons slitting throats; there’s Orlando Bloom, but there’s also Johnny Depp. There are no pretentions to educating people about the era of the pirates, the history of the Caribbean or the plight of the colonial British — when a movie dresses up its own undead pirates in dresses and parasols, skeletal and decaying and oh-so-pretty in the moonlight, you know that it’s not trying to bullshit you.

And really, what more is there to respect about a summer movie? Pirates of the Caribbean isn’t a warmed-over, struggling crapheap like Bad Boys 2, or a half-serious but totally-stupid death knell like T3. It’s just a fast, quick, pretty movie that delivers what it promises, which is on its own probably the most special thing you’ll see in a theater this summer.

Miscellaneous, etc.

The 10 Minute Review: Pirates of the Caribbean

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