Pirates of the Caribbean

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This entry was posted at
17:13 GMT on 2 August 2003

I saw Pirates this past week, and it is hugely entertaining.

I'd hold this up as an example of a good movie being made from an excellent script by a so-so director. The script is by the power duo of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who are possibly the best screenwriting team working on Hollywood today. Seriously, go read their draft of Godzilla and tell me it isn't a billion times better than what was made.

Their fingerprints are all over this film. The lines, the character arcs, the characterization of even the spear-carrier parts, the set-ups, the payoffs, this is a solid, solid script, and you can very much tell that just from watching the movie.

Then there's Johnny Depp. Oh, my, word. He's channelling Keith Richards, and somehow it really works. First off, Elliott and Rossio have given him the single best entrance in a Hollywood movie in at least the last five years, if not the last ten. I thought it was being overhyped to me. I thought I wouldn't find it nearly as funny as everyone else (I sorta knew what it was, but not precisely). Nope. I was laughing so hard I cried, and it tells you everything you need to know about this character.

But after that, Depp owns the movie. Or, as Harry Knowles wrote:

Depp’s Jack Sparrow isn’t a combination of pre-existing pirate characters… in fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d be willing to bet that Johnny Depp has never seen a pirate film.

Depp frequently makes oddball acting decisions (an Irish accent in Chocolat? For a Continental gypsy???), but almost as frequently, those decisions work. Here, they work wondrously.

The musical score is damn near perfect. It's boisterous and adventerous and exhilerating. In fact, it is perfect for this movie.

Before seeing it, I was all set to hate the mystical elements of this film. But no, they work beautifully. Everything here works, works well, like clockwork, except...

The climax. When your intelligent villain never figures out what I knew was going to happen ten minutes before it did, there's a problem. Now, if that climax had been trimmed by ten minutes, it would have worked. Or, if the method of the villain's downfall hadn't been telegraphed so darn obviously, that would have worked too.

But no matter, the rest is so darned entertaining, including the coda, that that hampers the movie only slightly. See it.

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