Ahoy, Mateys!

As promised, here it goes: my own very review for Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest. First of all, I need to warn you, my dear reader. This post contains a LOT of spoilers. If you haven’t still watched the movie, don’t read further. Unless you don’t give a rat’s ass about it, of course. Anyway, I mean it, if you don’t want me to ruin you the experience that is discovering a new story without the smallest knowledge about what’s going to happen in it, stop reading. This is your last chance. I won’t say it again. C’mon, stop staring at the beautiful words. Okay, if you haven’t stopped reading now, you’ll never do it. So here it goes...

After eight months of cinebacy, I, as a great movies fan, started to think that it was time to cut it out. My whole body was begging for me to go to a big crowded movie theater, armed with a big tank of pop-corn and a cola-flavoured beverage of a famous worldwide brand, that I’m not going to mention. To be there, I was saying, with my pop-corn and my Coca-Cola (oops), enjoying a spectacular movie, action-packed and extremelly funny. And, which movie would comply with those conditions better than Pirates 2? Or so I thought...

And indeed well I thought. The movie is extremely enjoyable, and IMHO, slightly better than its predecessor. I laughed, and I felt delighted, like a kid again, watching an adventure movie and eating pop corn (I’m not as pop-cornsessed as it might seem, lo giuro). The Pirates sequel has everything that makes these movies so likeable. It has a frenetic rhythm that never slows down its pace, fabulous landscapes, wonderfully done CGI monsters and creatures, pirate ships sinking each other without mercy, returning old known characters who change sides as their own interests force them, absurd situations that try to steal a laugh from the audience (and often do it), great portrayed and stereotyped villains. This movie has it all to be a hit.

The thing that does it for me is the way the characters are written. They’re humans, with human feelings (and then there’s also Sparrow). I mean, stereotyped as they are, they are very credible characters, crooks, self-centered or love-driven. Of course they are all beautiful people (except the ones that need to be ugly, and by Gelder they are), but, apart from that, the bad guys aren’t always so bad, and the good guys aren’t always so good as well. The couple of comical scoundrels Pintel & Ragetti (not a fashion designer franchise) are back again, this time as a couple of turncoats that always stand in the side of the person who can benefit them the most (or who will beat them the less, to be more accurate). Just the same as Commodore James Norrington (where have I read that last name before?), a man who had it all in the first movie, and who starts from less than zero in this one, turned precisely in that he despised so much: a drunk looser, nothing wannabe, a leftover. He didn’t handle at all his fiasco of the first film, he lost it all, and he didn’t take it well. The characters come and go, they enter and leave, they climb and fall, they die and resurrect... Just the way world is.

Bill Nighy, that actor whose face you know very well but you never remember where the hell did he appeared, makes a wonderful Davy Jones, the baddest guy of this movie. But he has his feelings too. I actually sympathize with him. Like with Bootstrap Bill, Will Turner’s father who’s always in search of redemption, or like with Elizabeth’s father, Governor Weatherby Swann, who gaves up on everything he believed in for love to his daughter, and once and again watches his own perfect world around him crumble and fall.

On regarding The Three Musketeers, Johnny Depp’s rendition of Jack Sparrow is as crazy as always, so there’s nothing new about that. Maybe in this movie he’s a bit more treacherous (and, BTW, effeminate) than in the first one. His relationship with Will Turner is once again one of mutual comradeship and trust... Who am I kidding? Will can’t stand Sparrow, but time after time he’s compelled to save him, or to put his trust on him. Jack, on the other hand, well... he really doesn’t think much of other people feelings, now does he? He doesn’t even think a lot about Elizabeth’s feelings (and, yeah, Keira Knightley is hot, finn5fel, we all know it), but he doesn’t miss the oportunity of playing with them. She, Elizabeth, ends a bit confused herself. At the last minutes of the movie, she tricks Sparrow with a warm kiss, sacrificing him to the Kraken to save her own life and those of all her friends. And at the very end she cries for that. Does she regret what she’s done, condemning him that way? Definitely. Is she physically attracted at least in some measure to Jack? Maybe. What kind of woman wouldn’t fall in love with a young handsome pirate who is totally crazy, a bit clumsy, who is completely egotistical and by the looks of him one would say he’s gay? And Will saw the kiss. That must have hurt. Wouldn’t had been wonderful if at the very end of the movie, when they’re given the chance to bring Sparrow back to life, he would have said simply "NO", and would have walked away? The hell with Mr. Sparrow and Elizabeth, who can’t trust him enough to tell him what she’s done. But, of course, Will agrees to follow Elizabeth till the end of the world (literally) to go saving Jack, because that’s what will make her happy. And Will’s such a gentleman, you know.

Of course Will and Elizabeth will end happily together, and Sparrow will sail the seas again, alive and as crazy as always. This is a Disney movie, isn’t it?

The movie, though, isn’t flawless. It’s far to be. It suffers from a McGuffin excess, on the first place. The characters are searching a non metaphorical key, and the chest that it opens. And the whole movie, and absolutely everything the characters do, it has to do with finding them. Who cares if the chest contains Davy Jones heart or anything else? BTW, I gotta say, if you have something as precious as your heart, and you want to keep it safe, don't put it in a chest and bury it somewhere, especially when you’re an almighty mutant pirate whose only weakness is that you can’t put your feet on earth except once every ten years. I mean, keep the chest with you, not the key. Or put it in the bottom of the ocean, but never there where you’re the only person who can’t have access to it. It’s stupid!

What was I saying? Yes, the McGuffin excess. The whole movie develops around that, and that can end tiring the audience. The line is not completely crossed, IMO, but not for a long distance. And another flaw I find to the movie, which can also end boring if not well used, is the excess of non-credible scenes. It’s the Peter Jackson’s King Kong syndrome. In that movie, there are a couple of scenes that are over-exploited, like the one in wich the filming party, in Skull Island, encounter face to belly with a herd of diplodocus-like dinosaurs (if not diplodocus themselves, which I really don’t know). Well, a brutal stampede follows, with everyone running through a narrow canyon between the legs of the dinosaurs. Well, what are the odds that anybody would survive to that? Very few, I should say. I would accept that it could happen (especially on a movie that goes about a zeppelin-sized ape that falls in love with a tiny little woman), but that scene goes on and on, and on and on, and never seems to end. The scene itself is so incredibly incredible that the spectator ends switching off and doesn’t buy it (or that’s what happened to me at least). And he gets bored. Well, the whole Pirate’s sequel is plagued with that kind of scenes. Not so obviously unbelievable ones, yes, but there are so many... like the waterwheel fight scene. It’s well designed, well filmed, well choreographed, but it’s so incredibly long, the wheel spinning and spinning, rolling and rolling, on the forest, on the beach, without something that blocks its way, without something that makes it fall. It’s something so incredible to happen, that if you make it happen, and don’t stop it at the right moment, weighs down the scene, and the movie itself. The good thing is that Pirates 2 is such a light-weight film, such a laugh-searching movie, that it can be forgotten. It’s appropiate to the general mood of the movie. Just like on the scene where they plan to damage the Kraken with six casks filled with gunpowder and thirty of so casks filled with rum. Sparrow shoots a musket ball to the net containing them and, miraculously, hits one of the only six gunpowder casks. Pues eso.


And another thing that I didn’t like: the repetitive story scheme. Captain Jack Sparrow is once again pursued by a doom. Wasn’t that the first movie storyline?

I will finish saying that nobody owes a movie to nobody. Despite all the things I’ve just criticized (that’s what reviews are for, aren’t they?), I really liked the movie. On contrary to finn5fel's opinion, it’s not the best movie ever. But I will never regret having broken mi cinebacy to go watching it. With all those small details and references... Doesn’t that wicked witch of the Caribbean that is Tia Dalma bear a strong resemblance with a character of our beloved Monkey Island videogame series? It was fun to watch it. And it will be more fun to watch the third installment, the next year, although I really really hope that nobody else gets resurrected. Even Barbossa, too? Let’s hope they've got a good explanation for that one.