Chapter Two:
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
By Brett Beach
June 24, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Runner-up question of the week: How would our cinematic universe be different (or not) if producer Don Simpson had not died from cardiac arrest due to combined drug intoxication 15 years ago next January?
This column and next, I will take a look at two of the most successful, polarizing, blockbuster-iest Chapter Twos of the last ten years, and by extension, the trilogies of which they are the middle chapters. A key issue to consider is: what was gained and lost when these films became trilogies? Would staying non-sequeled films have more positively enshrined their cinematic legacy? Certainly, their respective studio’s coffers would have been a lot worse for the absence. Interestingly, both films performed similarly in their domestic box-office trends, an aspect that will be examined more closely next time around.
By way of introduction: I don’t often suffer from anything that could be accurately labeled as “writer’s block”, but I have struggled with the foundation for this column for the past three weeks. A lot of it has been a rather severe scatterbrained tendency and almost laughable lack of focus due to many sleepless nights brought about by a certain child who has taken to waking up every one to two hours instead of every four to five.
When a mind, groggy and delirious at 3:30 in the morning, wanders adrift to consider various ins, outs and what-have-yous that would be perfect to include in one’s writing, it comes to seem that much more daunting by daylight that the writing in question hasn’t actually begun. That said, a fair share of the burden did come from simply wading my way through the films in question: 463 minutes (seven-and-a-half-hours) of my life.
I had seen Curse of the Black Pearl once during its cheap-seat run in 2003. My lone thought in retrospect was that Johnny Depp turned a $140-million-dollar tentpole production into something that had, at times, almost an off-the-cuff raggedness to it. Without him, it would be, well, a film based on a Disneyland theme park attraction. I watched Dead Man’s Chest on DVD after it came out and, I struggled mightily to get through it without falling asleep. This entailed stopping and starting the film several times. I had held off on At World’s End because any desire to see resolution of the cliffhangers raised at the end of Dead Man’s Chest had more or less dissipated by 2007.
To return to the queries at the top of the column - perhaps both these questions seem hopelessly naïve and the former more than slightly hypocritical. I will deal with the first question now and the second a little later on. In my last column, I waxed rhapsodic about the aftermath of a particularly vicious beheading in the film Shogun Assassin. Suffice to say, if said individual had misplaced his noggin in a Walt Disney feature, I would have been more than horrified.
And it’s not as if Disney films have ever been all rainbows and Skittles. Whether it’s the off-screen shooting of Bambi’s mother, the appearance of the Wicked Witch as the old hag in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, old mama Dumbo being chained up, or even Pinocchio’s travails as a donkey boy, Disney animated films have never lacked for visceral terrors with which its audiences (especially young ones) can wrestle during the night-time hours. The live-action output tells a similar tale in some instances.
To wit: Upon encountering Treasure Island again in early 2009, a film I had almost no recollection of seeing as a child, I was quite taken aback with the level of violence and the intense action. The deaths are all bloodless, but for a 1950 production aimed at family audiences (and the first completely live-action Disney film), the body count is significantly high. I can imagine children being quite devastated (if not as confused and mind-blown as by the psychedelic trippiness of Alice in Wonderland the following year).
Or perhaps that’s the naïve statement, and the juvenile audiences of 60 years ago were as adept with processing the scurrilous pirate behavior on display there as those of this past decade were with the PotC trilogy (soon to be quadrilogy). I shudder to contemplate such a possibility. I consider Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End to be a fair number of things but engaging family entertainment and suitable derring-do for younger audiences are not among them.
Dead Man’s Chest is the toughest of the three to write about, in part because it strives so mightily to out-do its predecessor and only succeeds at falling short by about that much, and in part because it is inexcusably boring. I find it fairly ironic that Johnny Depp’s inventive and off-kilter performance in the first film, the one that gave studio executives night sweats and heart palpitations as they feared it would be off-putting to audiences, is completely and utterly overwhelmed by the plot machinations of the second film. It’s as if his reward for being bold and choosing to trust the audience to follow along, was a fatter paycheck and the chance to see that spark snuffed out. If it is hard to achieve spontaneity and quirkiness in the middle of $140 million worth of spectacle, it is damn near impossible at $225 million.
Normally, I might criticize a summer blockbuster for being all style and no substance or being all heart but no brains. Dead Man’s Chest comes in for criticism of a different sort. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio cram the film full of so much plot sturm und drang that it becomes overwhelming and wearying. It’s as if they were told not to worry about doing any story editing because there were more than enough millions to go around to make sure everything they wrote would get filmed. The bigger the spectacle the better.
Characters rush from one location to the next, back and forth between ships, and maneuver through so many shifting alliances that a scorecard would be helpful. (And yet, am I the only one who feels that each time the cast finds themselves on a desert island, the exact same one is used? It lends a dizzying Groundhog Day slant to the proceedings that proves exasperating since no one comments on it.) Meanwhile, great actors like Stellan Skarsgaard and Bill Nighy are hidden behind makeup and CGI.
When seeing how the story here is intended to follow through on themes and set-ups in Black Pearl, and lurch towards payoffs and climaxes in At World’s End, it becomes apparent that all involved are attempting to make PotC as emotionally satisfying and epic as Lord of the Rings. Yet for all its dysfunctional family interplay, talks of heroism and redemption, and epic running time, it never feels like a true saga. The locations may be far-flung, but the universe of these pirates feels ever so small.
I am surprising myself by typing these words, but I wish they had stayed focused more on the escapism aspect. The banter and swordplay flurry between Depp and Orlando Bloom in the blacksmith shop comes to feel positively quaint. Consider in its place one of the big set pieces of Dead Man’s Chest: the extended battle for possession of said chest as Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and James Norrington battle across a sandy beach, up towards and through a deserted castle and finally on to a giant wooden wheel that breaks loose from its moorings and follows the call of gravity back towards the ocean. In theory, this should be a captivating and giddily amusing skirmish. However, two things prevent this from becoming a reality.
The first is that it never seems to matter much who gets possession of the prize. The battle lacks real heat because it never seems as if anyone is truly in danger. (This is, of course, undone in the third film, in which it seems not enough people can be killed off fast enough.) Even if the chest is a MacGuffin, which it kind of is for most of the course of the saga, the audience needs to believe that the characters want it badly.
The second problem is that the editing and camerawork undoes any tension that might reasonably be accumulating. We are given close-ups when long shots would work better and, as in other action sequences in the series, I yearned for slightly longer takes, to allow the full absurdity of the situation to sink in. I guess I am allowing myself to wonder what someone like Brian DePalma might have done with it.
Now, on to that second question at the top. I still find it strange that Jerry Bruckheimer is in bed with Uncle Walt. It didn’t happen overnight but it did happen in the wake of Simpson’s death. Bruckheimer produced numerous films for the Touchstone imprint before teaming up with Walt Disney Pictures for the first time in 2000 with the inspirational football tale Remember the Titans. Since then, there have been the three PotC films, the two National Treasure films, another true-life sports tale (Glory Road) and whatever you might classify G-Force as. The influence of this partnership is such that a production like the recent Race To Witch Mountain, which Bruckheimer wasn’t involved with, feels as if it bears his mark in the non-stop action and frenetic pace.
I don’t begrudge Disney for wanting to keep up with the times and make action adventure that feels edgier or cooler, but something like Race to Witch Mountain - for all its charm - feels like a cinematic training bra to get kids ready for a Pirates of the Caribbean and then, who knows, a Bad Boys 3? (once they have “outgrown” Disney films.) I don’t mean to lend a Glenn Beck-like air of breathless conspiracy to this, but honestly, after seeing At World’s End for the first time, I couldn’t believe it didn’t get an R rating. Setting aside 10-15 minutes of genuinely odd and disturbing sequences, the film is joyless, overstuffed, anti-climatic, nightmarish, apocalyptic, and unpleasant. The most that can be said is that it makes it that much harder to remember much of anything about Dead Man’s Chest.
And as noted, not once but twice, someone is shot in the head. Because the violence is bloodless (as is most all of it, including when one loathsome British officer gets face-fucked to death by Davy Jones’ tentacles), it seems to get a pass from the MPAA. I balk at this double standard. It doesn’t help that the action in both of these instances is so overwhelming and impossible to follow that it feels like such a brutal death was thrown in merely as a cinematic semicolon, punctuation to distract from scattered thoughts.
I find myself once again drifting away from Dead Man’s Chest so to rein myself in at the end, I think about some isolated moments to keep me focused: the way Depp sells that great line about the moments in life that he loves the most; how winkingly Geoffrey Rush (whose Captain Barbossa has become as indispensable as Jack Sparrow to keeping the series afloat) bites into his apple in the last scene; how Captain Jack nobly adjusts his hat before diving into the belly of the Kraken. In 2011, it all begins anew, as another film series rails against the dying of the light and the growing indifference of its audience. Best of luck mates, but count me out.
Next time: There is no spoon. Which is fine and all. It does make it hard to properly enjoy your breakfast cereal.