A year ago I promised myself (and my countless fans, and my invisible enemies) to weigh in on the sequel to the high-seas funfest “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.” Well, better late than never. The sequel then was “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest,” and now it’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.” So get out your sextant, batten your hatches and mizzenmasts and whatnot, and read on for my long-overdue two cents on these two movies.
Both sequels to the original “Pirates” were shot more or less at the same time and, I assume, against the same green screen. This may explain why “Dead Man's Chest” felt awfully like a stop-gap rush job. Failing to deliver the goods, the wretched thing came close to dampening rather than stoking zeal for “Pirate” spectacles, and worse, sucking the wind out of moviegoers’ loyalty to the brand. Be this as it may, we now have another go-for-broke descent into the maelstrom--the glorious, only-in-Hollywood mess that is “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.”
Before we have any actual fun with this picture, let me lay down a little film theory about action movies. In recent years these epics have begun a noticeable shift away from narrative conventions. Narrative elements, after all, are what bog down good action, good porn, good art. In action movies they can come close to absurdity, and while filmmakers superstitiously cling to them, adherence to a monolithic storyline (e.g., a coherent plot) is an indication that a movie is not an action movie but is rather a “dashie,” as in action *thriller* or action *drama*. I'm too young at heart to know for sure, but I suspect that being an action movie was once a bad thing--that movies failing to succeed on a level higher than their car crashes were labeled action pictures by undemanding audiences, dismissive critics, and even by their own makers. For this and other reasons, America's favorite kind of big-screen extravaganza never got a fair shot on its own, edged out by countless spy thrillers, war pictures, crime stories, and dashies.
All of this illustrates the fundamental Catch-22 of the action genre: as soon as you attempt to add substance, it undermines the action, which immediately goes to work for the quote-unquote substance. The result, which usually sucks, soon finds its way to the dustbin of film history, a.k.a. the Blockbuster action bin.
If you tear yourself away from that action bin and head for the Criterion Collection rack, you'll find—along with pictures by John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman and their ilk—two films by Michael Bay: one about renegade Navy SEALS taking over Alcatraz Island, the other about roughneck oil-drillers saving the world from a meteor the size of Texas. Why is it that Michael Bay, whose 2007 offering is a live-action version of Transformers, a one-time children's toy and after-school cartoon, is better represented in DVD’s winners circle than John Ford and Billy Wilder? I suspect it's for the same reason that Paul Verhoeven holds his own with Wong Kar-Wai and John Woo is neck-and-neck with Orson Welles: Without the beneficence of the Criterion curators, most excellent action movies would be doomed to languish as terrible transfers in $9.99 two-packs. Without big guns championing action as art, action would remain forever a dirty word, box-office boffo in the Red states and a dirty little secret of the Blue ones.
It's hardly cynical to suggest that sales of Bay's gorgeously photographed mega-super-blockbusters might go a long way in underwriting Criterion's devotion to Alain Resnais and Luis Buñuel; indeed, I hope that's the case. Every little bit helps the good fight to bring action into its own. Action movies need to rise up and shout to the heavens: We are not parables about good and evil! We are cautionary tales about keeping your dynamite dry! We don't *fail* at telling stories. We *succeed* at showing the effect of gravity on tiny pieces of glass in super-slow motion. Hear us roar.
And that's just what “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End” does. Since a movie has to be about something, this one is about no fewer than eleven pirate captains, not counting hallucination doppelgängers; Keith Richards; Chow Yun Fan, for some reason; and nine pieces of eight. Equal parts splatter flick and Looney Tune, with a fair sprinkling of Matthew Barney as a bonus, “At World's End” wriggles free of any ties to narrative convention in its opening minutes. And then it gets downright confusing. But as with all good drugs, you know not to fight it. It's better to embrace the madness and steer nose-first into the vortex than get dragged in sideways while trying to scramble away. And that is, quite literally, the heart, soul, and object lesson of “At World's End.”
If you have children who insist on having things explained to them, don't take them to this movie. Then again, having a child along might help if you yourself like to have things wrapped up in neat little packages; only a hyperactive ten-year-old could follow the ins, outs, ups, and downs of this film on a narrative level. But if you're well fed, reasonably rested, and undismayed by getting passed over for promotion or losing your favorite hat, odds are you'll relax into “At World's End” and enjoy what should be no less familiar an experience than watching a couple of hours of Warner Brothers cartoons. Every scene has a white hat and a black hat, and in the end the Road Runner is still zooming across the badlands. The coyote, blackened by his TNT cigar, has piano keys for teeth, but he'll get by.
– Jeremy Sterritt
(Jeremy Sterritt is proprietor and film critic of RadioOpticon, a.m. 1020 in New York, and at robinhoodradio.com)
