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.