What a Shame - Pirates in League of Their Own; Extraordinary Gents Not

What a shame – poor Sean Connery takes the reins as producer for what should have been a bracingly innovative fantasy romp, uniting his dignified swashbuckling credibility with an intriguing premise – a super-teaming of some of the most charismatic characters of classic fiction. The result? The worst movie I ever paid a jacked-up “bargain matinee” price to see since The Green Slime was playing down on Market St.

Trailers for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had me whispering “We’ve gotta see this!” to my girlfriend – not only did it feature Sean the Great, it had shots of an incredibly cool-looking submarine breaching, plus a cast of characters that included the Invisible Man and Captain Nemo. It begins passably sometime in the late 1880s, with a mysterious envoy recruiting Connery’s reluctant gone-to-seed adventurer Allan Quatermain for an urgent mission of world salvation (a scarred madman plots to foment world war, meanwhile profiting from sales of his super-weapons; now when has that ever happened?!). Things start to go bad as his fellow League members are introduced; they include a foppish Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend, apparently because they wanted Johnny Depp), Dracula’s Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) a vampire who inexplicably has no trouble remaining non-combustible in broad daylight, a petty sneak-thief who bought the invisibility formula off the original Man before he was killed (Rodney Skinner), and Dr. Jekyll (Jason Flemyng), whose Mr. Hyde is the love child of the Hulk and Ron Perlman. Oh yeah – and Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), who for some reason reports for duty as a be-turbaned Persian or Indian, and Tom Sawyer (Shane West), who matches the rest of the team the way anchovies go with honey-bunches of oat flakes. Whatever; in short order, the gang is on their way to Venice in a Nautilus that would give the Titanic feelings of inadequacy yet is still able to slide through the canals like a greased eel. There, they’ve learned, their pockmarked nemesis plans to explode a bomb in the heart of the city while its occupants are all at Carnival, and I do mean ALL of them; there’s not a candle or lantern to be seen in a single window of the shadowy digital metropolis. Their plan to save the city logically enough hinges on knocking down all the rest of the buildings before the bomb can explode while screeching around town in a Very Long Sportscar, to which 3-foot-thick stone pillars are as mere matchsticks.

It’s at this point that what is evidently a tag-team-written screenplay comes into its full glory, although someone named James Dale Robinson takes credit. If there was a plot or character development, I didn’t get the memo; the characters needle each other and engage in double and triple-crosses until no one cares anymore and we wish they’d all just die and be done with it, while every few lines various cast members remind Connery that his son died because he didn’t teach him to shoot well enough – when he knows that the real problem was that he signed the contract before the original writer was locked in. Watching the screen also became extremely fatiguing, as the steam-punk color palette ranges from slightly grey to very grey with stops in between at medium-grey and the occasional refreshing foray into black. Action sequences were numbing, chaotic jumbles of ultra-quick cuts. The ending credits list, by my estimate, 147 different digital effects companies that worked on this turkey; I imagine they had to keep hiring new ones as people quit in disgust. As I walked out of the theater, I wondered if it was too late to get my money back and sought out the manager, only to find that the only other couple in the theater had the same idea! He agreed “Yes, it’s terrible!” and generously gave us free passes, which we later put to good use for the terrific Pirates of the Caribbean.

…Speaking of which, Pirates of the Caribbean – Curse of the Black Pearl is arguably the best movie ever made, easily the best I’ve seen in months anyway. There isn’t a slack moment to be found; when I wasn’t guffawing outright, at the very least I had a stupid grin plastered ear-to-ear throughout the whole thing. This is the kind of movie that makes one want to live inside it, that will spawn legions of fan-geeks who can recite the whole thing from beginning to end. But wait – isn’t this just Disney being Disney, trading with practiced ease on the patented scary-but-safe pirate milieu they’ve created and refined over the years? (One has only to say the words “Arrr, Smee!” aloud to know what I mean.) Well, of course it is. But in this case, it’s completely, thoroughly enjoyable – George Lucas should be this entertaining.

There’s an orphan in every Disney film, and this one’s no exception. Young Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) is an underappreciated swordmaker’s apprentice in Port Royal. He yearns for the beautiful Elizabeth (Kiera Knightley), daughter of the timid but well-meaning Governor Swann (Jonathan Pryce), but he’s in competition for her hand with the fatuous Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport) who, by virtue of being buds with her dad and excessively clenchy about the nether regions, seems to be better favored to secure her in a matrimonial headlock – and Will’s self-esteem problems aren’t helping much either. Norrington’s just in the process of proposing to her on the edge of a really major cliff when she, short of breath from wearing a corset for the first time, faints and falls into the bay. Meanwhile, pirate Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), a foppish rogue with (we presume) a heart of gold, has been checking out the ships down at the docks in hopes of making off with one, his own rig being parked on the bottom at the moment. He jumps in, saves Elizabeth, and is thrown in jail for his trouble, on account of his reputation as a pirate.

In Pirates, the word “pirate” is always pronounced with special care, a mixture of revulsion and contempt, as if one had found a turd circling in one’s tea. It is made quite clear, should there be any doubt in this time of lax morals and hedonism, that to be a pirate is a Bad Thing; none of the colonial aristocracy – including Will, who’s a bit low on the social ladder himself to be putting on airs – have the slightest trouble recognizing Captain Sparrow for what he is and reviling him accordingly. The problem is that Will’s an orphan, and as the story unfolds, it begins to look more and more like he may come from a pirate heritage – years ago when, as a girl, Elizabeth found the shipwrecked Will, he was wearing a medallion of pirate gold, which she took from him and hid, unwilling to believe its obvious portent. Herein is articulated the main theme, the one the writers paid the big bucks for at Joseph Campbell’s Archetypes R Us Megastore: that one shouldn’t judge by appearances or station in life, that there can be worth even in a pirate, even in someone whose ancestry, upbringing or previous life has been questionable. Which, if you ask me, is not a bad little message, urging a compassion we could do with more of today.

Where were we? Ah yes, Captain Jack Sparrow. I have to stop right here and say: Johnny Depp is the man. He is completely hilarious. As fops go, he makes Beau Brummel look like a piker – I’ve seen stiffer wrists on female impersonators. He delivers his lines with a slur that bespeaks a life in which sobriety was tried once and rejected as an annoying inconvenience. He’s a dap hand with a sword, and lordy, can he accessorize! Look out Rhoda Morgenstern – your title as Queen of the Headscarf is in jeopardy.

While Depp’s in jail, Port Royal is ransacked by the pirates of his former ship the Black Pearl, now captained by his treacherous first mate Barbossa, (the marvelous Geoffrey Rush). Drawn by that medallion she’s wearing, they kidnap Elizabeth – it turns out it’s the last piece of a cursed treasure trove. Until they return it, they’re trapped between the world of the living and the dead, unable to find satisfaction in earthly pleasures, yet barred from the peace of death. In a nod to the Disneyland ride on which the movie is based, direct moonlight reveals them as ghastly living skeletons. Depp wants the Black Pearl back; Will wants to rescue Elizabeth; they reluctantly join forces, steal a ship from under the nose of the bungling Norrington, and set out after the brigands.

Instead of degenerating into a mass of action-adventure-special-effects clichés, Pirates only gets better as the pace accelerates. Rush is a dirty dastard we love to hate, with a crusty vocal delivery that would make the words “Prince Albert in a can” sound like Shakespeare, commanding a scummy crew of rapscallions who seamlessly transform to their skeletal selves under the moon’s gaze. The Black Pearl, rigged in tatters with a self-generating evil fog boiling off it, sends a chill up one’s spine as it closes on its prey, its curse-enhanced speed rendering it inescapable. Depp seemingly flip-flops alliances so many times that, although we know exactly what’s going to happen in the end, we’re never sure how we’re going to get there. The cinematography is mesmerizing – set in the glorious blue of an impossible Caribbean that never was, this is escapism at its most satisfying.