Despite some negative reviews by certain people I did enjoy this film. As long as you switch your brain off at the beginning, (which I find worryingly easy), and accept that the film has its tongue so far in its cheek it looks like a squirrel with a face full of nuts, Dead Man's Chest is all you could ever want in a pirate film.
It was basically two and a half hours of visual porn: lots of terribly beautiful people, (even the dirty, scummy pirates managed to be so in a Disney-friendly kind of way), doing lots of terribly well-choreographed swordfighting and generally prancing around being heroic. I was never quite sure what the plot was, or even if there was one, but then that wasn't the point.
Anyway, it was all very pretty, the fight scenes were brilliant and I especially enjoyed the bar-room brawl which was a textbook example of the genre: people being smashed over the head with bottle? Check. People being pushed over balconies? Check. It was just a gleeful celebration of the pirate movie.
There was a promising suggestion of thought-provoking idea; that the romantic, libertine pirating lifestyle was under threat from globalisation and capitalism (ie the East India Trading Company) but these themes were never satisfactorily explored. However, it did kind of feel a bit too much like a kid's movie; there were too many moments of slapstick and idiocy and it was never really able to pull away from that.
My main issue with the film was that it was ridiculously long: the scene on the island where everyone was fighting for the chest went on for what seemed like hours; going back and forth until I wished everyone was murdered horribly just so the damned scene would end. Ditto when Johnny Depp et al were escaping from cannibals' island. It was taking so long I was reminded of the escape bit from King Kong, (which I'm sure lasted for about 6 hours in itself: the film must have created some kind of timewarp whereby the 17 1/2 hours actually spent watching the accursed thing took "only" 3 hours in real time, but anyway...) and being reminded of that particular arse-numbathon is never a good thing.
The worst thing was that, after investing 3 sodding hours in a film you expect some kind of resolution at the end, but nope, there was more fannying around and then they had to set the scene for the next movie - which better have a bloody good ending, and lots more beautiful people and beautiful sword-fighting etc.
Pirates gets 2 stars out of 5
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