Pirates 3: A painful lashing with a cat-o'-nine-tails

It’s sad to watch a studio kill a good thing. The series has fallen so far from the freshness of the first film. Pirates 1 was a runaway sleeper hit with a fair storyline, classic swashbuckling action and the memorable character of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. The series has culminated (hopefully) with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, a film that stinks of whale anus. There is absolutely no salvation for such an arduous mixing of incomprehensible plotlines and forgettable characters with unrealistic motives.

I’m just going to briefly explain what I think has happened to the Pirates franchise and what should have happened. When Bruckheimer realized that he had a hit on his hands with the first Pirates he and Disney went overboard making sure the next two films were a grand cinematic endeavor. In the spirit of Lord of the Rings, the crew shot the next two movies weaving a huge epic adventure with multiple plotlines and more characters. Pirates of the Caribbean is the last franchise to deserve the epic treatment! It would have worked fine as a Harry Potter-like serial. What should have been done is to take a few common threads around which one can introduce new villains, new allies and new peril with each succeeding episode without altering the formula of the first movie too much. However, Bruckheimer opts for the Lucas approach and makes a trilogy with a definitive beginning and end. This, I believe was a huge mistake. It is rare that a move such as Curse of the Black Pearl can introduce characters that are generic enough to continue on endlessly and interesting enough to enjoy watching onscreen. Heck they could’ve made 5 or 6 loosely connected Pirates films and it would’ve been fine with me as long as you give them all a beginning, middle and end, add some good one-liners and sweet special effects. But no, somehow overblown faux-epic crap tends to sell off of hype alone.

It’s hard to give a plot summary, but it has something to do with the East India Trading Company persecuting the pirates so badly that they are forced to unite and fight back (an endeavor that takes around 2 hours to finally happen!). Then there’s rescuing Jack Sparrow from the dead, Will and Elizabeth are having an ambiguous quarrel, there’s a lady doing a bad Jamaican accent that factors into things somehow, Chow Yun Fat makes an appearance as some Pirate Lord, and Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbosa is back from the dead…and a good guy! Now imagine out of this entire cast of characters not knowing whether or not any of these schmucks are good-guys or bad-guys! That’s right, it was honestly hard to figure out who was motivated by what, who was double-crossing whom and why. Really by the middle of the film the only good-guy left in the film is Keira Knightly, and I’ve always considered her a bad-guy anyway. The plotlines are tangled up so messily that the entire movie just came across as incomprehensible. After every scene my sister and I just turned to each other and went “what the…?” The film is kind of like coming in on a conversation and not knowing what is being discussed. You get bits and pieces of coherence, but can’t quite put it together. I saw “Dead Man’s Chest”, but I guess I didn’t remember enough of it to tie it in with “World’s End” or maybe they were too loosely connected to make any sense. You, the viewer, are given no exposition or setup for this film at all, it just plunges right in, and then it takes over an hour to get to the first action scene! It’s uncanny just how boring this film was. Even Johnny Depp’s antics as Jack Sparrow fall flat. The film unwisely takes the viewer into what appears to be his now entirely schizophrenic psyche with a few of the dumbest scenes ever. Depp is funny on his own, stop messing with him. Plus, Sparrow isn’t even a major character in this. There is no main character, everyone is just a pawn in progressing the film’s incomprehensible storyline. Director Gore Verbinski has taken every mildly delightful character from the first movie and rendered them completely charmless. Having Geoffrey Rush back from the dead as a good guy could have been a good move (he delivers the same delicious performance as Captain Barbosa) except that most of his screen-time is reduced to explaining what is going on and why all the pirates need to join and fight the British. He ends up being kind of a spare.

Pirates 3 also transgresses one of the hallowed Alex Wilgus laws of sci-fi/fantasy cinema *ahem*: In order for something to be extraordinary, it needs to take place in an ordinary environment. The skeleton pirates in Pirates 1 were at least treated as unusual and scary, but by this film, mutant fish pirates are hanging around with British nobility, crews travel effortlessly to mythological worlds and fantastical things happen without any character blinking an eye. Like the Matrix, the world of Pirates regresses into a reality without simple rules like death or gravity.

The oddest thing about this film is that the last ten minutes are actually pretty satisfactory. After it’s all over, the film actually returns to some of the roots planted by the first film. The romance ends bittersweet and Jack Sparrow returns to the seas as a Pirate errant. It’s funny, because the very last few minutes started to excite me. I was thinking “oh yeah, this whole Pirate setup is kind of cool” then it ended, and I was reminded of the two and a half hours of crap that preceded this ultimately decent finale. If anything this movie made me want to see the first one again and forget that this one or the second one ever happened.

Sentimental Spidey

I’m going to go ahead and get this out there for all you naysayers: this is not a bad movie. I understand if things were disappointing, a little convoluted or not as good as the last two, whatever, it doesn’t change the fact that this movie is still good. It’s not as good as the triumphant Spider Man 2 (a tough act for any comic flick to follow since it’s largely hailed as the greatest superhero movie of all time), and it’s not as fun as the first one, but the simple fact is that there are more things that work in this film than don’t and it is a decent entry into the Spider Man series and a very good entry into the superhero genre as a whole.

The main thing that this movie suffered from was success syndrome. The las two films were so loved by fans and critics alike that part 3 has a pretty tough act to follow, and let it be known that the same director using the same characters being expected to produce a new bag of tricks for every movie in a series that both critics, die-hard fans and the average popcorn-munching moviegoer needs to love is a near-impossible feat. Director Sam Raimi called this the most stressful movie of his life which is not hard to believe considering the amount of villains, plotlines and special effects that went into it. The film does feel a little overstuffed at points, but it does level out in the end and finish what it started.

The setup is that Spider Man/Peter Parker is on top of the world, the city loves him, Mary Jane loves him. He’s so full of himself that all it takes is some alien, outer-space goo to turn him into an overconfident, reckless superhero out to take revenge on all who cross him. The black suit is a physical manifestation of people’s tendencies to be brash and self-absorbed. The metaphor workds really well. The imagery of revenge and self-righteousness becoming like a venomous symbiote that can attach itself to you and never let go is an excellent picture. The 2 ½ hour film sees Peter Parker’s original mantra of power and responsibility being challenged by no one but himself.

But Parker’s dark side is not the only villain, oh no, there are three (count ‘em) villains in this picture, Sandman, Green Goblin 2, and ultimately Venom. Of all of them Sandman is the coolest; it was really great to see such a classic villain come to life so vividly. Harry Osborne’s new goblin has the same weird techno suit, but the chase scenes where he tears after Peter Parker down alleyways and up in the sky was breathtaking.

Anyway, there’s some stuff that didn’t work too. The story felt a little awkward around the middle as the Peter/Harry/Mary Jane love triangle was reintroduced. It felt a little forced, and there was one segment involving Harry forcing MJ to break up with Peter that was never really explained. Anyway, the point was that Peter needs to get pissed at Harry for the rest of the “revenge” story to work. There is also a scene where Peter is consumed by the black suit and in a daze of self-absorption walks down Michigan avenue giving girls winks and shooter fingers. He combs his hair down in a pathetic attempt to look “cool” and even does a comic dance in a Jazz club to spite Mary Jane. Contrary to many, I thought this scene was great. It was very true to Peter’s character. It’s important to remember that he is in his heart a total nerd, and when he is possessed by delusions of grandeur, the result is pathetic, not awe inspiring. This scene was comic genius. The Jazz club scene felt like it was right off Stan Lee’s hallowed pages.

Couple of nitpicks from a fan: It’s annoying to me when Spidey is unmasked in nearly every single fight. I understand how it plays up the humanity, but honestly, everyone knows who he is! Keep the mask on, Raimi!

Also, the villain geneses seemed a little coincidental. Oh man, that crook just happened to fall into a sand neuron quantum emitter experiment!!! Or oh no some asteroid just happened to land next to Peter in a park and the alien symbiote followed him home! Well, whatever, these things are minor.

In the end I liked this movie because it never departed from the natures of the characters and even explores another side of Parker that was stimulating, even if it wasn’t as fun to watch. The story of a hero becoming a villain is not very fun to watch because it leaves you not knowing who to root for. Sam Van Hallgren of filmspotting.net said it best: “Raimi has not given up on sentimentality.” It is true that the end of the film could be called “sappy”, but I thought it was an impressive attempt at making a superhero film more than just a special effects fest (Fantastic Four). Maybe it doesn’t work as well as the first two, but it is refreshing to see a summer movie with more of a heart than just money making action. I do not have high hopes for Pirates 3 in that department, but we’ll see. It’s just nice to hear a major motion picture that includes lines like “a man must put his wife before himself”. I don’t know about Sam Raimi’s faith, but he at least has a much larger conscience than do most action directors.