Yo Ho Ho, and a Bottle of Hmm

Earlier this month the first teaser trailer for the fifth entry in their Pirates of the Caribbean franchise dropped upon a world that released a collective, “They’re still making these?” The teaser contained more of the same – attractive, fey leading man, a mysterious villain from Jack Sparrow’s past, a heavy dose of occult and supernatural elements. To think that this was once a franchise based off of a theme park.

My reaction to that teaser trailer was a sudden urge to re-watch the older entries in the franchise. These films rolled out while I was in high school and college, so I saw them in the theaters during their opening weekends like everyone else around me. Well, the first three anyway. By the time I was sitting waiting for the end credits scene of At World’s End to hurry up already, I was ready to send this franchise off into the great beyond.

Has any franchise dwindled away good will as quickly as the Pirates films? That’s a question I’m not entirely sure has an answer, but this one seems like a good enough example of that particular phenomenon. So, how do the five films hold up? Let’s find out….

The Curse of the Black Pearl

Forgive the pun, but the pirate genre was dead in the water by 2003. The last hoorah was 1995’s Cutthroat Island, a bomb so notorious it tanked the careers for all involved for several long years. More ominous warning signs lingered over The Curse of the Black Pearl – how exactly does one make a big-budget blockbuster on the basis of a theme park attraction? Is Disney serious about bankrolling a blockbuster on the back of Johnny Depp, at this point in time a well-respected character actor with no box office sway? Not only Depp, but Disney was investing this much time and money in a blockbuster lead by two relatively unknown British actors?

We were naïve in 2003, in a sense, no that Pirates eventually box office dominance and franchise spawns were obvious at the time. But when the final product is so crowd-pleasing and fun, so drunk upon the images and clichés of the pirate genre, its success isn’t quite so astounding in hindsight. It’s still shocking just how successful this whole thing was, but what’s even better is how well this first one holds up in spite of the sequels.

Yes, The Curse of the Black Pearl does overstay its welcome by about thirty minutes or more of extended double/triple-crosses and fighting, but there’s enough freewheeling, exciting film-making to power you through. I assume it was Disney’s controlling hand here, but this is a prime example of formula working very well. The two romantic leads play the straight men, Depp gets to be the charming rogue scene-stealer, while Geoffrey Rush’s villain is gloriously theatrical, and the strength of the technical aspects glide you into the home stretch.

There’s no narrative surprises or pieces of character development that decades of popcorn entertainment haven’t prepared you for, but they’re employed with uncommon strength. Orlando Bloom’s Will and Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth are our young lovers with a backstory that ties into the central curse/mystery, while both also work effectively as protégés for Depp’s unique creation. This is the hero’s journey distilled down to its very essence in much the same way that it was in Star Wars.

Bloom’s a bland but very handsome presence here, a bit of a blank slate that allows the other two to shine brighter. (This will not change in any of upcoming sequels.) He looks like a Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, but displays none of the personality despite ample chances. Knightley gets the better and more interesting role. She transitions from damsel-in-distress to pirate-princess-in-training over the course of this film while exhibiting a ton of spunk and personality. This film lays the groundwork for a rarely seen example of a female character becoming an action heroine.

But the first entry is best remembered for the spontaneity and freshness of Depp’s freshmen outing as Jack Sparrow. Getting an Oscar nomination for his trouble, Depp creates a character that spends much of his time wobbling around in a permanent state of inebriation, experiencing sporadic moments of lucidity and keen-eyed intelligence. This character would eventually devolve into pure caricature, but the darkness lurking underneath the androgynous, flamboyant character work to flesh him out. His moments of steely-eyed sobriety are bracing for how smartly they are deployed in rare moments. This performance is an iconoclast for Depp, creating a brand new pop culture anti-hero in the process. It changed his career, ushering in the era of Depp-as-movie-star which was enchanting for brief period of time before it was squandered on a series of increasingly loud and poor blockbusters (many of them the sequels in this franchise).

This film may belong to Depp, but he’s not the lone essential performance here. The only other major cast member to appear in every entry of the franchise up to this point in time, Geoffrey Rush’s hammy, rafter-shaking Barbossa, the rival pirate captain afflicted with the curse. Rush plays the role with the verbose artifice of a Charles Laughton. When these two aren’t warring with each other, either verbally or in sword fights, the film finds a way to marry swashbuckling adventure, romance, mild horror (the curse turns a band of pirates into zombies), and a quickly unraveling mythology (this made-up on the fly vibe will escalate with each successive film) that they try to make feel lived in and authentic.

There’s a lot going on in this daffy tapestry, and the film cannot hold all of this weight. But my god is it from! Unburdened from history, this film is what we go to the movies for during the summer months. It’s escapism at its finest moments, heavy on the signs and symbols of pirate lore, and clearly in love with its sword fights, goofy accents, parrots, secret treasure, and rococo humor.

Dead Man’s Chest

Everything wrong with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest can be perfectly summarized in the frenzied battle that encapsulates much of the climax. There’s Will, Jack, and a dispossessed Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport) fighting in a gigantic spinning wheel across an island terrain. Meanwhile, the two comic relief pirates (Mackenzie Crook and Lee Arenberg) are chased by Elizabeth after they steal the title’s chest. Soon both of these groups must stop their in-fighting to take on Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and his crew. If you’re exhausted reading that much plot dump, well, we haven’t even mentioned Beckett (Tom Hollander), a heavy from the East Indian trading company who sneers and pulls puppet strings throughout the plot, and Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), a swamp dwelling witch who exists as both exposition dump and the keeper of vital character backstory for several players.

Plot bloat was already a problem in the first entry, and this sequel only exacerbates this problem. Less is not more, more is more, and too much of a good thing is simply Disney trying to demonstrate blockbuster dominance. This bloated feeling isn’t simply from too many characters demanding time and attention, but too much time spent on frantic action sequences that drag on past the point of being enjoyable. We get two daring escapes across islands in circular contraptions, two Kraken attacks, two love triangles, and numerous other instances of the film doubling back on itself. Editing would only have improved matters.

If it sounds like I disliked Dead Man’s Chest, well, you’d be wrong. The problems are obvious and there’s no going around them. Yes, this one also outstays its welcome, but it’s still highly enjoyable for the sheer lunacy on display. This is a movie with Davy Jones envisioned as made up from various barnacles, crustaceans, and an octopus face. There’s an immortal monkey, an island of cannibals, plenty of gags involving a pirate’s fake eye and his newfound religious views, and the female character getting the more interesting character development.

There’s a lot to like about the Pirates franchise in general, including the ever-expanding mythology that feels breezily constructed for a vague framework, and Dead Man’s Chest is no different. It’s a definite step-down from the first, but it’s solidly entertaining and well-made. I mean, zombie-pirates revealed only in moonlight is cool, but an entire ship and crew made up coral and sea flora and fauna? That’s awesome, and provides some moments to stare in awe at expertly done special-effects work and wholly original creature designs.

Ok, so maybe the Kraken attacks have not aged well. And by not aged well, I mean what once looked terrifying and majestic on the big screen now looks rubbery and painfully artificial. Thankfully these moments are kept to a minimum and the stellar work done on Jones and crew (mostly) remains convincing and engaging. It helps that many of their scenes take place in darkened rooms, atmospheric lighting, or in the rain, all tricks and forgiving circumstances for special effects to retain their power.

In fact, Dead Man’s Chest is a darker, more atmospheric experience all around. There’s still an element of swashbuckling daring, an alchemy of too many disparate elements coming together to form a mixed brew, but the gallows humor and more supernatural aspects of the first take a strong grasp here. It’s not a bad thing necessarily, but eventually the foundations start to crack and there’s still another hour or so of movie to get through. Then there’s the ending which is clearly open-ended for the sequel, not so coincidentally filmed back-to-back with this one. Just as idiosyncratic and rambunctious as The Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man’s Chest still threatens to sink underneath the weight of its own ambitions.

At World's End

If the prior year’s Dead Man’s Chest was a rollercoaster that consistently threatened to careen wildly off the tracks at any moment, then At World’s End is a whirligig on a crumbling foundation. The sense of bloat that’s always threatened to devour these films reaches its apex here, with nearly three hours of convoluted plotting, unnecessary side-plots, and lore that spirals out quick enough to meet the demands of the plot.

Once more, I don’t hate this entry in the Pirates franchise, but with (broken) promise that this would end the series, it seemed a fitting enough ending. Will and Elizabeth grew over the course of the series, their plots get a pleasing conclusion, Jack’s sense of self-preservation warred with his better impulses, and Barbossa chewed scenery throughout. Keith Richards cameos as Jack’s father, an assembly of pirate leaders provides many uniquely colorful and distinct characters, and there’s enough spectacle for several films to be found here.

It’s just incoherent and needlessly complicated. It’s easy to forget that this was once based on a theme park attraction! Granted, The Curse of the Black Pearlused up a majority of the most famous sights and sounds of the ride so they had to branch out. I said most, At World’s End includes audio lifted directly from the original ride. Just in time for these back-to-back sequels, Disney completely renovated the ride to include Jack, Davy Jones, Barbossa, and the cursed Aztec gold in a bit of corporate synergy. If that isn’t a perfect metaphor for the presence of these sequels, I don’t know what else is.

Does the plot really matter? No, it hasn’t in any of these up to this point, and this one is overstuffed to the max. There’s Chow Yun-Fat as a pirate lord of Singapore, and completely underutilized, and Davy Jones and Tia Dalma’s past is revealed while simultaneously shuffling them off to the side to focus on…. well, it’s hard to say. There’s the East Indian Trading Company, led by Tom Hollander’s sneer and glower, there’s the gathering of pirate lords, there’s Davy Jones and Tia Dalma, there’s our two love birds, there’s Barbossa, and they each double-cross each other then go back again. Then they switch sides once more, before switching back, and are you confused yet? Good. You should be.

None of it makes any sense, and good luck trying to keep all of the players and their motivations square. I gave up a long time ago and just sat back to watch the visual splendor of it all. And there is a ton of it to be found. While the franchise may have squandered much of the good will from the first film by this point, director Gore Verbinski still gave you plenty of reason to keep your eyes on the screen with his imaginative and distinct images. A pirate ship sailing across a still sea with the stars reflected upon the surface, given the distinct impression of them sailing through space, has enough poetry in it to keep your interest.

The thing that’s so damned frustrating about these sequels is how they drop in a series of smart ideas and characters with potential, then squander it all with stupid choices. Elizabeth Swann’s transformations from society ingénue to pirate king (yes, king) is far more interesting than Will Turner and his daddy issues, but guess who gets the lion’s share of the screen time? Then there’s Davy Jones, so major a role in Dead Man’s Chest, stuck playing supporting player to far less interesting characters, while Tia Dalma and Commodore Norrington barely register in this bloated epic at all. Meanwhile, Jonathan Pryce’s Governor Swann has spent the entirety of this trilogy as background decoration and little else.

The darkness that threatened to overtake Dead Man’s Chest swallows up At World’s End, quite literally in the climactic battle between all three major parties across two boats locked together over a whirlpool. Or the opening, which finds pirates (or those accused of piracy, or those found guilty of aiding piracy, including a young child) being led to their death, by hanging no less, and defiantly singing a sea shanty while waiting for the bottom to drop. It is in these moments that the film’s muchness becomes a serious case of too much of a good thing. I respect the titanic ambitions and originality of visual splendor in these films, even their sense of fun, but my god, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Then they made a fourth film.

On Stranger Tides
After a five year dry spell, the Pirates of the Caribbean returned with a new director (Rob Marshall), two returning players (Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush), and minus two others (Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom). On Stranger Tides, based on a novel by Tim Powers, is what a franchise looks like when it has stayed too long at the party.

Ironically, this is the shortest of the film’s in running time, but there’s not enough propulsive energy or fun to be found here. This makes On Stranger Tides feel like the longest of the four films. This one somehow finds the magical spot between being both over-spiced and under-cooked. Once again, there’s too much going on here, and yet not enough of it is given much thought or significant detail to work.

I never thought I’d miss Orlando Bloom, who for all of his fey mannerisms and swoon-worthy good-looks distinctly lacks charisma as an actor, as the lead of this franchise, but this one just proves that a little bit of Jack Sparrow goes a long way. With Jack Sparrow now officially leading the proceedings, there’s no one for him to bounce his inebriated logic off of, no one to act as sober counterbalance to his inanity. I knew I was going to miss Keira Knightley’s fierce and fiery Elizabeth, one of the few characters that could outmaneuver Jack and get respect from him. The film needed a straight man for him to play off, and without one this just proves that too much of one note is devastating.

Here we follow Jack in his quest to find the Fountain of Youth. Barbossa, now working with the British crown (Richard Griffiths, corpulent and boorish as King George II in a glorified cameo) joins in on the journey. Blackbeard (Ian McShane, perfection in casting, underused in execution) and his daughter Angelica (Penélope Cruz, a welcome feisty presence with a thinly written role) kidnap Jack for his knowledge. And then there’s Spanish, who are only vaguely important to the plot despite being the third corner of this triangle Jack finds himself in. Then you have to throw in a missionary (Sam Claflin, so pretty), mermaids (including Astrid Berges-Frisbey as one of our new lovebirds), and cameos from Keith Richards and Judi Dench.

Since this is the first entry to be based off a book’s plot and not borrowed imagery from the rides, there’s a distinctly off-key feeling throughout. Much like the Marx Brothers in Room Service was deeply unexciting for the way it forced screen personalities into a story that wasn’t built around them, On Stranger Tides feels like a patchwork event. The romances, both of them, are ineffective for the ways they’re underwritten, and despite McShane gloriously chewing scenery and capable of projecting menace with but a glance, Blackbeard doesn’t linger in the imagination like Bill Nighy’s Davy Jones. There’s just not enough for him to spin into gold despite how game he seems.

Wasting McShane is a cinematic sin, but so is the way that Gore Verbinski’s unique visuals disappear under Rob Marshall’s workman-like visuals. There’s no joy or splendor here, and many of the sequences land with a thud that no amount of gorgeous natural scenery or detailed costuming can mask. The only sequence worth its might is the mermaid attack. No kindly Ariel’s here, these mermaids are the darker brand and their scene feels like a thrilling horror movie plopped into the middle of a sleepy pirate yarn. Even worse, while At World’s End closed with a sense of a completed story, On Stranger Tides ends openly with the possibility of another sequel. 

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Well, this one is at least better than the prior entry in this never-ending franchise that has grown stale and cemented into a series of character tropes and ideas recycled from one chapter to the next. There’s nothing new added to the expanded mythology here besides the presence of young, dewy lovers who are obviously intended to take over the franchise once Johnny Depp is ready to let Jack Sparrow rest, and even then, they play out as lukewarm versions of the characters played by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. Any franchise has a natural lifespan, and Disney’s refusal to let this one go makes the freewheeling, anarchic, bloated fun of Gore Verbinski’s three films look worse as more chapters dilute their luster.

Dead Men Tell No Tales borrows its title from one of the few pieces of ephemera in the ride that the prior films hadn’t already consumed and regurgitated back up on the screen. Part of me waited for the talking skull to drop the line before a shocking action or explosive action scene kicked in, but there was no such luck. Instead, we’re treated to another entry where a villain is stuck to live a supernatural life stuck out at sea. The franchise seems to view the seas as both the nurturing mother, the charismatic devil, and a perpetual state of limbo depending on where they fall on the protagonist, antagonist spectrum.

Here we follow Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites, just as bland and dreamy as Bloom) as he tries to break the curse left upon his father at the end of At World’s End. Concurrently we also follow Carina Smith (Kaya Scodelario), a young woman doomed to be killed for the crimes for witchcraft because she can perform complex mathematics as she tries to unravel the mystery of the map that no man can read. Naturally, their ambitions dovetail as they seek the same object: the trident of Poseidon, an object with the ability to break any of the sea’s many curses. Jack Sparrow gets drawn in, Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush is still in glorious ham mode) replays his fremeny antics, and our villain is a ghoul stuck at sea with a past that ties directly with Sparrow’s.

If any of this sounds routine and familiar in this franchise, then good, that means you’re paying attention. Dead Men Tell No Tales is simply a Frankenstein-like super-entry in the franchise that takes pieces from the prior four films and shoves them all together. Occasionally it manages to liven things up, a zombie shark attack is bit of spark and fun that much of the surrounding film is missing and Javier Bardem playing to rafters of the neighboring theater, but it mainly feels like you’ve seen all of this before and done better. It’s the sight of a franchise doing a soft reboot on itself after fourteen years.

And it still repeats the major problem of On Stranger Tides by mistaking Sparrow as a leading character when he works best as a loopy, chaotic supporting player. It was shocking to revisit The Curse of the Black Pearl and be reminded of how shocking and daring his original performance was in lieu of what has happened since. It’s now a predictable series of tics strung together in a perfunctory manner that suggests the sight of Marlon Brando slumming it in dreck like The Island of Dr. Moreau. It doesn’t help that Thwaites can’t manage the straight-man demeanor to Depp that Bloom actually did well with, and that whole scenario merely becomes something of another cog in a noisy machine.

Somehow, Dead Men Tell No Tales is the shortest of the four films at just a little over two hours, yet it still manages to feel as stretched out as At World’s End, the longest entry in the series. A good chance that the film’s inability to surprise us like the first three could with their completely bonkers set pieces and mythology could. Now this franchise feels like one of the rides at the Disney theme parks – rigidly locked into place and stiffly moving through the same motions over and over again. Except it’s not as fun as any of those rides.

They’ve already announced plans for a sixth film. Please, for the love of god, send this franchise to the locker already. Send it out to sea, return it to the murky bilge, insert whatever sea-related pun you’d like Disney, just give this franchise a rest already.