Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Starring: Johnny Depp, Orlando Boom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Stellan Skarsgard, Jack Davenport, Kevin McNally and Naomie HarrisDirected By: Gore VerbinskiWritten By: Ted Elliott and Terry RossioRated PG-13Walt Disney Pictures

What started out as a theme park ride and turned into a big-budget mainstream Hollywood feature film threatens to become a surprisingly respectable piece of cinematic pop art with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. On July 7, Walt Disney Pictures follows-up its hugely profitable 2003 film Pirates of the Caribbean with what is sure to be a hugely profitable sequel – a sequel designed to serve as the second part of what is certain to be a hugely profitable swashbuckling action trilogy.

Johnny Depp returns as the pirate Captain Jack Sparrow. Following the events of the first film, Sparrow has regained full ownership of his vessel The Black Pearl only to find that he still has to make one final payment on it to the undead Captain Davey Jones – an unsavory deal involving his soul, the legendary ship The Flying Dutchman and the slightly more legendary sea beast known as the Kraken. He also faces a less supernatural threat in the form of a death warrant from none other than the vast corporate empire that is the East India Company. It is through this death warrant that Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) are once again mixed-up in the life of Captain Jack.

Returning director Gore Verbinski (The Ring, The Mexican, The Weather Man) directs an action film in a way that is positively Spielbergian. The flow of action and story have the energy of an Indiana Jones film. Shots are composed with a love for both composition and storytelling that make the film highly entertaining even when it drags for small stretches of its two and a half hours on screen. This is the least you would expect out of a summer action film with a $200 million production budget. With actors like Depp, Bloom and Knightley, you’d probably expect the acting to be solidly above par for an action film. It is. What you might not expect is a story with solid dramatic complexity. Oddly enough, this is exactly what you get.

This comes as something of a shock from credited screenwriters Ted Elliot and Tony Rossio. (These guys wrote such vapid films as Shrek, Treasure Planet and 1998’s Godzilla remake.) There’s a dramatic chemistry between the film’s stars that Elliot and Rossio have amplified beautifully. Over the course of the story, there’s a solid exploration into the nature of the relativistic moral ambiguity in their actions. Unlike so many other fantasy action films, no one here can be written-off as being “good” or “bad.” Everybody has his or her own motivations. Quite often, people fight amongst each other when they really need to be working together to solve bigger problems. Everyone here takes turns playing hero, villain and comic relief. These aspects of the film come perilously close to sounding like real life complexity for a summer action film that bears the ghastly, bloated, corporate stamp of Walt Disney below the title.

Being the second part of a trilogy that ends next summer with the third film, POTC: Dead Man’s Chest ends with most of the major plot points unresolved. (After a spectacularly cinematic and heroic exit, Captain Jack disappears and it’s uncertain what’s going on between Will and Elizabeth.) Being the second part of a heroic adventure fantasy trilogy, the feeling at film’s end recalls the feeling at the end of 1980’s Empire Strikes Back. While Pirates of the Caribbean isn’t destined to be as influential as the Star Wars series was, its moral and thematic complexity are an extremely satisfying step forward in the action fantasy genre. VS

Russ Bickerstaff is a local poet and writer. His poems can be heard regularly at Linneman's Monday Poetry Night.