Libertas' "Dirty Harry" begs Richard Schickel's indulgence, proceeds to review Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End, whose plot (and by plot, read: reasons by the writers to generate swordfights, terabytes worth of bitchin' CGI, or both) he finds remarkably convoluted:

Every added plot point does the unthinkable. It crowds Jack Sparrow out of the film. Throughout, Sparrow’s frequently left literally in the background mugging or reacting or out of focus with the other extras. It was like watching the debut of Abbott and Costello in One Night In The Tropics; you just wanted to scream, We don’t care about any of this, let Jack do something! And yes, he’s given his moments, and yes, they’re the highlights, but nothing’s as inspired as before. Good comedy requires a good story or it becomes episodic. Sparrow reminded me of that guy in Airplane! who would dash in and out firing wisecracks.

Oh sure, I get Johnny Depp and Stephen Stucker confused all the time, too.

Seriously though, that was exactly the reaction I had to the first sequel to Pirates Of The Caribbean. The original film earned enormous goodwill through Johnny Depp's inspired performance. It was so deliberately over-the-top, goofy and good-natured, that it lifted what would have been an otherwise routine popcorn film into something that had much more of a heart than the average assembly line Hollywood CGI-fueled action flick.

But the sequel last year reminded me of something that Richard Lester once said, when he compared The Beatles' Help to their much more inspired first movie, A Hard Day's Night. This is a paraphrase, but it was something along the lines of, "We couldn't just repeat A Hard Day's Night, so the sequel just sort of ended up trapping the Beatles in their own movie". Or as Lester told Steven Soderbergh in 1999:

If you didn't want just to do a colour version of A Hard Day's Night and you think "Well here are these people playing themselves and we don't want to see what they do in their work, we can't show you what they do in their life because that's X-rated so what are we going to do with them?" We have to therefore make them passive responders to some external stimulus and that was how Help! came about.

And that's what the second Pirates Of The Caribbean movie felt like to me--instead of Depp in the foreground, with the action occurring naturally behind him, it felt much more like Johnny Depp trapped in a zillion dollar equivalent of a typical Disney theme park ride, passively responding to the external stimulae.

And it sounds like little has changed with the threequel. Oh well--at least there's Keith's cameo.