What is it about the unwieldy titles this summer? Only a week since The Rise of the Machines, we now have Pirates of the Caribbean. Or to give this Jerry Bruckheimer production its full title, 'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl', which makes it sound like a particularly nasty mini series, populated by the likes of William Shatner, Charlton Heston and others of their ilk. Thankfully, Pirates of the Caribbean does not feature any of those old hams. But we do get more pork than a pig sellers' convention in the shape of the performances from Geoffrey Rush and an utterly maniacal Johnny Depp, who appears to have based his character on a hybrid between a drunken Keith Richards and a fruity Errol Flynn.
The kind of oaf that his peers refer to as a 'swishbuckler', Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp) is an outrageously over the top creation. His character may be fairly adverse to Barbossa (played with ruthless abandonment by Rush), but the two actors' pure campness is a unified front, unparalleled in modern cinema history. For a Bruckheimer production, the narrative strikes a neatish balance between comedy and action, with the matinee-style plot wobbling around like a dodgy but thrilling ride at an amusement park (which is precisely where 'Pirates of the Caribbean' owes its inspiration from). It's a bit too long, two-and-a-half hours, when a director of more strategic means than Verbinski could have dealt with the plot in a no-less-thrilling 100 minutes or so. Still, for his lax pacing there's precious little the director tries that he doesn't get away with, thanks to the frothy tone adopted, those action sequences and the wonderful production values. Oh, and not forgetting those quite insane performances.