Too many crooks spoil the brawl: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: Fantasy/Adventure
Director: Gore Verbinski
Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley Storyline: Will, Elizabeth and Barbossa bring back Jack from Davy Jones’ Locker to take on the East India Trading Company.
Bottomline: Gore, you pirate!
Triumph of CG: Pirates … At World’s End
If you don’t remember much of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,’ you will end up savouring this instalment with a pinch of salt, lemon and Tequila shots.
Remember those Jai Santoshi Maa/Maha Kali/Amman films where devotees in need of a miracle pray to the Goddess and she obliges, striking down the bad guys with lightning and thunder? ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,’ actually gets into that league, only on a lavish multi-million dollar scale.
Only that here Kali Maa becomes Calypso, the Amman for the pirates.
Complicated contortion
A reasonably savvy ‘Pirates’ fan who knows to tell Pintel (the crazy, bald pirate with the dirty teeth) apart from Ragetti (the one-eyed pirate always in search of his glass eye) would want to like this film. Nay, to worship it even.
But to completely comprehend this complicated contortion of crooks crossing each other, check out the ‘Chest’ chapter, closely.
On first viewing, this lets-make-it-up-as-we-go narrative seems to have been written under the influence of barrels of stale rum.
For instance, it doesn’t seem to bother to connect itself to the previous part except for the basics such as Jack Sparrow is dead, Will Turner has made a promise to free his Dad from Davy Jones and the East India Trading Company is cracking down on pirates.
The deadly Kraken is knocked out of the cast, and gets reduced to a mere one line mention. And there’s a Calypso. Now what? Is there a Chosen One too? Brethren Council of pirates? Is the second half going to feature Jedi knights fighting with light-sabres? But as you go back to the ‘Chest’ episode, you will find that the clues are all there. The new plot complications don’t seem to have come out of the blue anymore. And you realise that the writers (regulars Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio) had designed the second part to deceive.
The Pirates franchise has always needed large amounts of willing suspension of disbelief. And, yo-ho-ho, another bottle of rum. This overdose of pirate lore is constructed to look like the ‘Captain Jack Sparrow’s Improvisation Show’ best seen in high spirits.
Gore Verbinski, with his flair for comic book imagery (the frozen toe moment is a vintage vignette), employs some of the best-ever visual effects in this madcap triumph of computer generated animation, backed with meticulous top-notch production design (except maybe for that primary school puzzle map to the World’s End) and potentially award-winning cinematography to bring alive the old world charm of pirates along with magic and fantasy.
All the mandatory classic Pirate-moments are there: the great escapes, sword-fights atop huge structures, monkey business, the quadrangle of Will-Elizabeth-Jack-Norrington, the motley crew of crazy pirates (there’s an extended family in this edition, including an Indian pirate called Sri Sumbaji), Jack-Barbossa rivalry over captaining the Black Pearl and those glorious shots of the Flying Dutchman jet-skiing out of the sea. There’s also a wicked Keith Richards cameo thrown in for a bonus.
Trying hard to accommodate all these disjointed elements to set up a convincing finale, the screenplay ties itself up in knots.
A slow sloppy start steadies itself with Sparrow’s spectacular special-effects-spiked second-coming, only to move into a muddled middle, with the Calypso-plot seemingly thrust in as a quick-fix miracle-solution to tricky situations conjured up by the need to keep the narrative unpredictable.
The film, however, redeems itself with a racy fitting finale to the Pirates trilogy, setting up a nice little premise for a fourth instalment. Captain Jack Sparrow, the pirate that he is, steals the best lines from the book and Johnny Depp revels in the role celebrating his superstardom.
Screen-scorcher at sea
Finally, Orlando Bloom gets something substantial to do to help him win the fancy of an audience that is long tired of watching him brandish a sword every ten minutes. Screen-scorcher Keira Knightley is clearly at sea doing a Mel Gibson-Braveheart-routine but sizzles stepping out of Will Turner’s shoes. Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbossa once again bites into a crunchy chunk of the film, lending style to match Jack Sparrow’s presence. So, does the 168-minute long ‘At World’s End’ merit a watch in spite of being the weakest of the three parts? Aye! Must, actually.
SUDHISH KAMATH
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