Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Rating

Director

Gore Verbinski

Screenplay

Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie, Jay Wolpert

Length

143 min.

Starring

Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Jack Davenport, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg

MPAA Rating

PG-13 (For action/adventure violence)

Review

The days of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn are long gone but the types of swashbuckling adventures they had are still around. Pirates of the Caribbeanreturns to the days of grand adventure and danger on the high seas.

Johnny Depp stars as Jack Sparrow, a lascivious drunk whose exploits as a pirate are renowned throughout the Caribbean. Now, having been abandoned by his crew, he goes in search of a new ship and crew to take to the seas with and continue his nefarious ways. The catch is that as a pirate, he’s taken as a liar, a cheat and a thief, not to mention having a warrant out for his arrest. Even his attempts to save Governor Weatherby Swann’s(Jonathan Pryce) daughter Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) from drowning don’t save him from imprisonment.

The film opens in the plot’s past as young Elizabeth, accompanying her father to see, helps save a young boy, the only survivor of a vicious battle with a pirate. There, she takes a pirate coin from his body to prevent her father from instantly killing the pirate-child. She never returns the gold coin to him and keeps it hidden from view until the present. Meanwhile, the boy grows into a man under the adoptive care of the town’s weaponsmith where he learns two crafts, sword making and sword fighting. Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) is deeply in love with Elizabeth and is one point in a complex love triangle that also involves Governor Swann’s favorite officer, Norrington (Jack Davenport).

While Sparrow is imprisoned, his old crew, now headed by Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), comes to town searching for the last piece of pirate gold that will remove a horrid curse that has befallen them. They abduct Elizabeth and take her off to return the gold to its rightful place and perform a ritual that will return the crew to normal. The only problem is, she can’t help them break the curse and the crew is forced to go in search of the right person to lift it.

Depp gives an outstanding performance as the smooth-talking, vile and unlucky lead. Easily his best performance in years, Depp shows a great deal of acting range in this role, one that could have easily been stereotypical and corny. The rest of the cast expand in talent because of his presence but seldom rise to his ability. Rush is a suitable captain, he chews his lines and spits them out in a perfectly antagonistic way. Bloom, hot off the screen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has a lot to live up to. His performance is far inferior to his role as Legolas but has the makings of a screen heartthrob. Knightley is perfunctory at best. Her performance is neither interesting, nor particularly good. Being the only woman in the cast makes her job very difficult and she fails inmost of her attempts to play the strong heroine.

The overall design and layout of the film is fantastic. Capturing a bygone era can be a difficult task and with such a standard genre to work with, it is even more difficult to make things stand out without looking tacky. The costumes, sets and cinematography help keep the ambience where it needs to be. The editing is fast-paced when it needs to be and not so slow that it drags. Atypical of action-adventure films, no individual shot fights with another to have its moment of glory and every shot lasts just long enough for the viewer to make out the details and move on. You get to see every detail of the fights while still feeling the peril of the characters.

Pirates of the Caribbeanwould be nothing without its story. A potential misstep was in the making when Disney decided to adapt their legendary amusement park ride into a feature film. This was a relatively old ride that, while enchanting for millions of visitors, didn’t have much to go off of for a story. Screenwriters Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie and Jay Wolpert took a very risky bet with their adaptation and managed to create a believable, fast-paced, storybook adventure that keeps the audience intrigued and delighted from beginning to end. Director Gore Verbinski recognized the potential and developed an amazing cinematic voyage within the world of piracy.

Pirates of the Caribbeanis a wonderful film that will tantalize and delight audiences of any age. Destined to be one of the biggest movies of all time, Pirateswill endure long after the genre has been pillaged by every other film company out there.

Review Written

September 20, 2003