Do we love Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow? Of course we do. He worked up something strange and lovely for this character in the first
Pirates of the Caribbean three years ago, and he’s deliriously at it again in the new sequel, subtitled Dead Man’s Chest. It is not just a matter of his eye makeup or his funny way of walking, running or (sometimes) sitting still — as when he discovers, to his dismay, that the cannibals have decided to make him the centerpiece of their banquet. It goes deeper than that: Jack is a modernist, unaccountably obliged to the mindless heroics not only of an antique movie genre, but to the whole ethos of an era when everyone heedlessly advances into action, swords drawn, instead of, more sensibly, retreating into their studies to think things over when danger threatens.
Jack, frankly, is an anachronism. A
lot of his dialogue could be comfortably fitted into a contemporary Owen Wilson romantic farce, and a lot of his more muscular activities are desperate existential improvisations. Depp lets us see his mental gears whirring (and very often clanking) before he takes action that in some way subverts everyone's expectations. You might say that he’s the anti-Errol Flynn.
The context of both Pirates movies aims for similar subversions. You will recall that in the first film the bad pirates that abducted the governor's daughter (Kiera Knightly)
turned out to be representatives of the undead, which involved her swain (Orlando Bloom) and Jack with a lot of special-effects figures (they turned into skeletons when night fell). This was, I thought, a drag, but it was rendered tolerable by the wit and originality of Depp's performance. This time, the plot device is
quite similar: The eponymous chest contains something that will return Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), king of the underseas underworld and, yes, captain of the The Flying Dutchman, no less, to the land of the fully living.
But Davy is
half octopus, half man, and his crew seems to have been recruited from the Star Wars cantina of yore, though they have even worse skin problems and are covered with the kind of slime that has recently become fashionable among the villains in fantasy films. They are not very menacing or scary and neither are the threats they pose to Jack and his pals. There's also a whole thing with a giant squid that may put such ancients who attend the senior matinees in mind of Cecil B. DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind (1942). And that says nothing of the water
wheel that comes loose from its mooring at an old mill and rumbles across the countryside, quite like the ferris wheel that rolled out of an amusement park in Steven Spielberg's 1941 to similarly mirthless effect.
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