Earlier this summer, Deadpool & Wolverine came out and featured some of the clumsiest and most consumerist– yet still enormous– compositions ever realized, and not a minute of the film went by without ad-lib nonsense spewing from Ryan Reynolds’s lips. Deadpool & Wolverine exemplifies most of what has gone wrong with big-budget filmmaking. It’s an ugly brand advertisement overflowing with abrasive, crude humor. The individuality of actual artists effaced by corporate goulash and accountant excretion. Or, to word things another way, we took the Pirates of the Caribbean for granted and now we live with the consequences of our actions.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was an improbable film. Before the franchise, Hollywood executives viewed piracy (of both kinds, I suppose) as a bane and not a boon to the adventure genre. Most pirate films up until 2003 were box-office stinkers. 1995’s Cutthroat Island easily ranks as one of the biggest financial disasters in film history, and for the majority of a decade its damage kept pirates away from the multiplex. A handful of Disney executives wouldn’t let their fever dream of adapting a movie based on their Pirates of the Caribbean amusement park ride die, and thank the gods of the silver screen for these strident believers. They hired Jerry Bruckheimer to produce the crazy idea and the relative newcomer director Gore Verbinski, coming off his success adapting the Japanese horror film Ringu (itself an adaptation of a book) in 2002’s The Ring, to realize the four-writer script. The film would star Johnny Depp in one of the most idiosyncratic performances in modern Hollywood, a performance so niche and spunky it’s a miracle he didn’t get the boot, and would kick off the 17-year-old Keira Knightley’s career. The Curse of the Black Pearl is a remarkable start to one of the most consequential franchises for the new direction of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking — it’s also a franchise producers seem insistent on learning the wrong lessons from.
Despite being the genre-defining pirate film, The Curse of the Black Pearl begins by curving most of the established genre expectations. The mutiny against Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) bumps into the dialogue from time to time, but it happened well before the events of the film. Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) led that mutiny and now captains a crew imprisoned by an old Aztec curse that turned them undead. There isn’t even that much pirating if we are being honest! The only stale bits of the plot are the dufus extraneous minor characters Pintel (Lee Arenberg) and his one-eyed friend Ragetti (Mackenzie Crook). The two pirates recoup none of the potential they waste and they might be the worst reminder of the film’s origin in an amusement park ride.
When I remember the Pirates films, Depp’s Jack is a big part of why. The ironic entrance holding a hero pose on top of a sinking ship’s sail with a big score from Klaus Badelt (and input from Hans Zimmer and future composing stalwart Ramin Djawadi) fits the character’s unforgeability. His mannerisms, especially the way he eccentrically holds his wrists and always seems aloofly looking at a horizon beyond, trap the viewer in a captivating spell of originality. He is both naive and charismatic, unassuming and unfailingly entertaining. Maybe the best way to describe Jack is as an insecure adventurer deeply confident in his own luckiness. The golden tooth (Depp’s choice) and ornate and layered costumes complement this indescribable performance. His effeminate drunken theatricality would surely annoy if not weighed down with drama (or if it lost Depp’s sincerity, as would happen with the fourth and fifth films) and you’d get something more like Reynolds in Deadpool & Wolverine, a role so annoying and unfunny that this viewer would have rather been on the phone with an IT department demanding that the computer voice put a real human on the line than enduring that divinely unsanctioned and testing run-time again.
The Pirates films are damn near the closest Hollywood ever got to the action-comedy genius of Jackie Chan, and it all starts with the filmmakers actually letting the action be funny (and not only relying on verbal sparring matches). The YouTube video essayist Just Write points out that Verbinski merges his action and comedy as a visual storyteller whereas Marvel neatly separates their jokes and their action; the former simply makes for better action-comedy though. Jack’s entrance is also an example of this! The joke is completely told through a combination of the framing of Depp, his confident acting, and an ironic movement away by the camera. The thrust of the story is also about returning a treasure rather than stealing one (something Jackie Chan would also often do in his films). Also like a good Charlie Chaplin or Jackie Chan film, the productions become extensions of the action. The first act fight in the blacksmith shop is a thrilling case and a good fight. It’s a shame we traded the direction The Curse of the Black Pearl put tentpole filmmaking on for whatever this is.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
2003
dir. Gore Verbinski
124 min.
Screens on 35mm Thursday, 8/29, 7:00 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Afterparty with themed food and drinks at the Coolidge Education Center!
Part of the ongoing series: Rewind!
Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and In Review Online. He has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, Off Screen, and DMovies amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.
