a wolf angel is not a good angel

First of all: fun. Really. Of course you can’t follow the plot. Why is Will double-crossing Jack who is double-crossing Barbossa who is double-crossing Elizabeth? I don’t remember. But it doesn’t really matter, you’re not supposed to be able to follow who you can or cannot trust at any time. If you assume everyone has a few hidden agendas you’d be pretty much on. If you decide just to ignore plotting, that would not really change the movie for you.

So let’s dispense with the idea of plot. You don’t see these movies for plot. You see them for amusing dialogue, maybe (yes, other than the irritating repetition of some lines). You see them for fun fight scenes (yes). You see them for stupid jokes that don’t depend on farts (yes — I particularly liked the pieces-of-eight one). You see them so you can listen to Geoffrey Rush say Arrr a lot (yes).

As usual, there’s a scene after the credits that you should, maybe, watch. For maybe, see after the jump.

Here be spoilers.

They fixed up one of the major problems in the shows and made Elizabeth Swann a major actor who people listen to, inasmuch as anyone listens to anyone else. They also added more Geoffrey Rush, and scenes with him and Johnny Depp, which are among the best. They did a clever Being John Malkovitch kind of hell for Jack.

It does drag a bit. It took ages for them to get Jack to show up. The beginning, where they kill a child over talking about all the rights (habeas corpus, etc) that people no longer have, was alternately amazing (they killed a kid! in a Disney movie!) and dull (look at all these rights you don’t have, does this look familiar? DOES IT?), and the fight scene that follows soon after is not quite as impressive as one would like.

Tia Dalma continues to be the magical Negro complained about in the last film, but even more magical. She gets a bit more plot, true, but also an idiotic ending.

They also decided to resurrect the Will/Elizabeth romance, ending it with what seems like Elizabeth waiting around for Will most of the time. Presumably movie 4 will explain what she’s doing (being the pirate king?) in the intervening 10 years. But I found it irritating — all we needed to see was her sailing off (like, but not with, Jack) and then back with Will when he could return and I would have been less annoyed. It’s entirely out of character for her to just sit waiting, and it would have been nice if that had been acknowledged. (I grant that characterisation in this series is iffy, but Elizabeth-as-unwilling-to-wait-for-others-to-act is about the only consistent thing in 3 movies.)

This isn’t a review so much as a scattershot response, but that’s fair enough probably.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under screened. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.