Jack Sparrow returns for more giddy smiles.
In the opening minutes from
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
, we're greeted with a tragic scene. Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) frets over the absence of the groom on her rainy
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wedding day. The groom in question-Will Turner (Orlando Bloom)-is escorted onto the premises in shackles. Both Elizabeth and Will are charged with high crimes, and face a death sentence.
Stop me if at this point you give a crap.
I'm willing to guess that I can continue, because Bloom and Knightley-hard to decide which one is more blandly pretty-had virtually nothing to do with the rousing success of 2003's
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
. It was Johnny Depp's rum-sodden Capt. Jack Sparrow-with a capable assist from director Gore Verbinski and Geoffrey Rush's ghostly pirate Barbossa. The original
Pirates
was that rare blockbuster that connected with audiences not on the basis of a star or a concept, but on the basis of a performance. And when Sparrow makes his latest entrance here it's as though the movie is announcing, "All right, folks, now we can really get started."
Indeed, once
Dead Man's Chest
does get started, it rolls along with an energy every summer movie should aspire to. First it needs to deal with the necessary machinations of getting all the principal characters back together, which in this case involves Will being required to track down Sparrow in order to save his and Elizabeth's lives.
Sparrow, meanwhile, has his own problems with
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which to contend-like the fact that he apparently owes his soul to Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), creepy captain of the
Flying Dutchman
.
Once again Depp fully inhabits his seagoing spin on Keith Richards, wrapping his lips around florid syllables or turning drunken stumbles into something approaching graceful pirouettes. Screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio try to give the character some tension between his cowardly nature and a sense of loyalty, but they know well enough not to mess too much with what worked the first time. They give Depp space to use grimaces and raised eyebrows with a subtlety that makes it unfair to call what he does "mugging." It's pure comic acting, and it's still enough to carry an awfully big movie.
It'll probably be enough to carry another movie as well, when the third
Pirates
installment-already filmed concurrently with this one-sails next summer.
Dead Man's Chest
ends with a cliffhanger that finds our heroes in an
Empire Strikes Back
level of disarray, and leaves Sparrow in a pretty tight spot awaiting resolution. But that's somehow only fitting. It provides the perfect set-up for Capt. Jack to make one final improbably entertaining entrance.
