Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Sabre rattling: Commodore James Norrington (Jack Davenport), Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) cross paths, and swords, in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Courtesy Buena Vista Pictures.

The lasting pop-culture appeal of pirates is impressive, considering their many dubious qualities. In literature, music and film, they’re usually described as thieves, liars, cads and drunks, and noted for atrocious personal hygiene. Yet, like ninjas, we seem unable to resist rooting for them — or worse, wanting to be them.
Swashbucklers such as Blackbeard, Long John Silver and William Kidd have achieved immortality in our imaginations. They’re the perfect anti-heroes: rebellious, bound to no moral code but their own hedonism and imbued with a sense of romantic intrigue. Although they’re ostensibly bad guys, we envy their lusty, entrepreneurial spirit and their constant pursuit of liberty and happiness.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the second film to feature Johnny Depp’s fey, floppy Captain Jack Sparrow, invokes one of the most familiar names in pirate myth: Davy Jones, the fiendish dweller of the deep whose legendary locker (a euphemism for the bottom of the sea) houses the souls of drowned sailors. The origin of the Jones character is murky, so director Gore Verbinski and his visual-effects team exercised their creative licence. Played by an unrecognizable Bill Nighy, the character is a grotesque ghoul with a beard of writhing tentacles. Prone to hammering out dark fugues on his pipe organ like a carbuncled Phantom of the Opera, he’s one of the creepiest villains in recent memory.

The chest of the film’s title belongs to Davy Jones, and its contents are of great interest to Jack: it holds the key to controlling the seas. When the film opens, Jack and his crew are being detained on a remote island by cannibal savages who have mistaken him for a god. The sequence is an early stumble for the film; the clumsy stereotypes of the island’s natives have already drawn complaints from rights groups. But Depp is in fine form, clearly relishing the chance to revisit one of his most colourful creations.

Meanwhile, back on the Caribbean island of Port Royal, blacksmith and aspiring pirate Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and his fiancée, Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), are facing persecution for their association with Jack. A stern British lord, Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), promises to clear their names if they bring him Jack’s special compass, which has the uncanny ability to guide people to their deepest desires.

Never trust a pirate: Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and Sparrow (Johnny Depp) listen to Ragetti (MacKenzie Crook) tell another tall tale. Courtesy Buena Vista Pictures.

Morality is a central theme in the film, a point demonstrated soon after Will finds Jack on the island (rather too quickly, in terms of the film’s pacing). To appease the natives, Jack imprisons his old friend with the rest of his crew, the first instance in which the would-be hero betrays an ally to save his own skin. From there, the movie careers through dozens of convoluted plot points; like its predecessor, Dead Man’s Chest is both too long and too complicated. But Depp keeps things interesting as Sparrow twitches and struts across the line between good and bad. His worst crime is abandoning Will to toil with Davy Jones’s crew of half-men, half-mollusks aboard the ghostly ship the Flying Dutchman. Jones asks him, “Can you condemn a friend of yours to a year of servitude in your name while you roam free?” Sparrow replies, with callous ease, “Yep, I’m good with it.”

At this point we’re introduced to the film’s real villain: global commerce and stuffy hegemony, as represented by the British East India Company. Left disgraced after the first Pirates film, The Curse of the Black Pearl, ex-commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport) hatches a plan to hand Jones’s chest over to Cutler Beckett, in return for the title and status he lost in the first film. Although Jones is a devil and Jack a scoundrel — he debases himself further by trying to seduce Elizabeth — the two end up in mutual opposition to the company, which is seeking the chest to gain control of the seas.

To use a business analogy, Norrington and Beckett are the multinational giants to the pirates’ small-c capitalists. The British East India Co. is bent on dominating the ocean, thus quashing the lawlessness that makes piracy possible. When Norrington reveals his intentions, Jack calls him out for succumbing to “the dark side of ambition.” It seems that for pirates — no strangers to greedy ambition — monopoly is the greatest evil of all.

So we end up rooting for the thieves, drunkards, even the demons as they remain defiant in the face of The Man. It’s a classic David-and-Goliath scenario, and it’s a big part of why the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise works so well as popular entertainment. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Dead Man’s Chest is also great fun, featuring exotic locations, beautiful cinematography, eye-popping visual effects (including a sea monster battle that’s one of the best going-down-swinging scenes ever put to film) and a keen sense of its own silliness. It's proof that the summer blockbuster, like the life of a pirate, is all about unmediated pleasure, sensory indulgence and high adventure. All together now: “Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate’s life for me …”

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest opens July 7 across Canada.

Joel McConvey is a Toronto writer.

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