I don't remember where exactly I read it, but I was afflicted by an article recently claiming that we shouldn't dress kids as pirates because it perpetuated toxic masculinity because real life pirates were horrible, rapey, murdering shit heels or some other such thing. I mean, yeah they were, but so were vikings, cavemen, any of the Universal Monsters canon, and roughly 70% of Hollywood [citation required] so unless you want to dress your kid up as a stick for the remainder of their pre-teen years you aren't left with many options. My point is you're not dressing your kid as a real pirate, you're dressing them up as a sanitised, family friendly, costume shop pirate and that's ok. You can probably see where this is going.
You'd be forgiven for not having noticed Pirates of the Caribbean had rolled out a fifth film in the franchise. You might also be wondering how they managed to scrape together 10 hours worth of cinema out of an animatronic ride at Disneyland. Hell of a question that and in certain respects quite an achievement. It wouldn't be much of exaggeration to say the first one was by far and away the best and I'll be the first to admit that quality has diminished with every outing. I think there was an unnecessary amount of grief doled out surrounding the plot and how convaluted it all got as well as accusations that Johnny Depp was just phoning his performances in. It wasn't the easy to follow in places but it still made for some good old swashbuckling action and actually I think if Johnny Depp wants to just act drunk for the duration of filming then so be it. I think he's paid his dues.
Declining standards or not, I'm struggling to recall anyone being genuinely excited about the prospect of more Jack Sparrow at this point. Even I wasn't overwhelmingly gutted by not catching at the cinema. So what are we looking at with installment five? Startling revelations? Daring and inspired character developments? A fresh and rejuvenated outlook over a well worn in franchise? Yeah none of those things are a thing. Come on now.
Pirates of the Caribbean has always been the search for a macguffin. Movies live and die by how quickly you realise that there's a macguffin, without which the entire plot crumbles like Kevin's Spacey's credibility. Hush you, it's never too soon. Often, several macguffins congregate around a single plot hole and almost certainly more than one person will be searching for one or more of said macguffins and hilarity ensues. There is also always a fairly liberally smattering of the aforementioned, PG rated, family orientated and completely safe-for-work (or children's costume) undead shenanigans, but that's a side effect of the macguffinery more than anything. There are almost too many to mention: cursed aztec gold, Davy Jones' chest, the Fountain of Youth, Geoffrey Rush's dignity (I hear they paid in monthly installments to spread the cost). So far so piratey I guess, but apparently the newest "only thing that can save Jack this time" here is the Trident of Poseidon. The actual mythical weapon carried by the actual Greek God of the Sea. Whether that completely undermines Calypso from previous macguffin hunts is never really mentioned, probably because continuity is for landlubbers and mutineers. One way or another it guarantees total control over the sea, just as Blackbeard's sword (which Barbossa now casually waves around) did but I guess when you already had the most powerful seafaring artifact you could think of just kind of knocking around, you have to try and raise the bar somehow. I'm not saying they probably had to halt the writing proceedings at least once because someone in the back kept on piping up "Blackbeard's Sword" in a faux cough, but let's face it, it isn't a stretch.
The hordes of undead trolling around this time are ghosts, rather than zombie skeletons, moldy fish guys or indeterminately "cursed" pirates which would be a refreshing change of pace but for the fact they could have crewed any ship in any of the previous outings. True to current Hollywood form, we get Captain Jack's lavish back story which nobody asked for and I'm pretty sure retcons him getting the compass from Calypso to him getting it from Unnamed Pirate Captain Stereotype Alpha. Cue some fairly ropey electronic Oil of Olay and a dead-eyed, digitally de-crinkled Jack is up to his usual cocky pirate tricks, casually murdering the ever-loving shit out of an entire crew of sailors using nought but his savvy. Don't over-analyse it, these aren't real pirates and some stand-in is wearing Johnny Depp's face while he does it, so it's all good. Javier Bardem is actually fairly effective and creepy as Captain Salazar, but I've seen No Country For Old Men so he could be reading a list of technical lighting requirements for a dog fashion show and I'd still think he was fixing to stick a cattle bolt into my skull. Other than some cameos (one of which is a ship), some shamefully cack-handed attempts to crowbar future proofing into the series (does anyone care about Will/Elizabeth Turner-Swann's annoyingly precocious offspring? Resolutely not) and a decent number of expensive looking set pieces, this is ultimately just the same movie. Again.
Except that is isn't. It's like someone was baking a delicious cake, gathered all the right ingredients together then tried to make it just using a photo as a guide for measurements. I don't care how you slice it; it just won't taste right and that's what we have here. The elements are there, but they're cobbled together in such a fashion that it feels empty and lifeless. Sadly it seems that there's perplexing life in the old sea dog yet if the post credit sting is to be believed; I can't help thinking Johnny Depp's divorce must have been messier than we thought and I sympathise to an extent, but I think some things are better left in The Locker.
No comments:
Post a Comment