Summer movies want little more than to be as exciting as theme-park thrill rides.
This would seem to give an advantage to an actual theme-park thrill ride made into a movie.
Disney's successful productions are like party guests who don't know when to leave. The studio has turned its animated movies into live-action films, stage musicals and straight-to-video sequels. Recycled material has a marketing advantage but can also be creatively risky, as anyone who endured The Country Bears, based on a Disney theme-park attraction, will attest.
But the latest attraction to make the trip from Orlando to Hollywood is a happier story.
Even in a summer of unwieldy titles using a semicolon, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl trips off the tongue as uneasily as a Summerfest stage named after its corporate sponsors.
If memory serves, "Pirates of the Caribbean" is one of those rides people go on when lines at more popular rides are too long. But Pirates, the movie, gets the last laugh on its theme park brethren. It is a fast-moving, wickedly funny and vividly mounted distraction that brings to mind adventure romps like The Mummy, The Princess Bride and Disney's The Mask of Zorro, with Antonio Banderas, a midsummer tonic in 1998.
"Pirates" is The Mask of Zorro clutching at a bottle of rum with bony fingers that have dirt under their nails. Things revolve around Johnny Depp, as a dissolute and gregarious pirate who lost his ship to a mutiny and seeks revenge. While stealing a ship in a coastal community, he rescues a young woman, played by Keira Knightley, from drowning; crosses swords with the blacksmith, played by Orlando Bloom, who loves her; and is thrown into irons.
Bloom and Knightley have known each other since childhood, when he was rescued at sea and she snatched a pirate medallion he wore around his neck while he was unconscious. It turns out the medallion is part of a treasure that was cursed, and which turned the same crew of misfits that Depp lost to mutiny into the living dead. The only way the crew, now led by Geoffrey Rush, can remove the curse is to return the treasure and spill blood doing it.
Depp hasn't been this appealing since Edward Scissorhands. He is sexy, stupid and savvy, all at the same time. He is quoted as saying he based his character on Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, and he has the slurred speech, unfocused gaze and crooked smile of a boozy street-fightin' man.
Rush is Depp's cursed straight man, and their scenes together combine the can-you-top-this quality of a cartoon with the discipline of experience.
And Bloom, who wielded a bow in The Lord of the Rings films, is a wispy Errol Flynn.
Pirates was directed by Gore Verbinski, who directed the stylish thriller The Ring, from a screenplay by the co-writers of Shrek.
That it was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer meant cost was no object, and it shows. Visual effects supervisor John Knoll gained water expertise on The Abyss and worked on the Star Wars prequels. The effects, such as when Rush's crew is revealed as ghostly in moonlight but as flesh in the dark, or when they walk along the bottom of the ocean, are convincingly eerie.
But the numerous sword fights start to look the same after a while and make the film feel long.
At the risk of further encouraging Disney - previews for an upcoming film based on the thrill ride The Haunted Mansion with Eddie Murphy look dreadful - let it be known that Pirates hits one out of the theme park.
©2003, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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