Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl ★★★

IT’S hard to explain why pirate movies are so difficult to pull off. Perhaps it’s due mainly to the restrictions they are forced to work within.

Compared to say an adventure film like Raiders of the Lost Ark, the pirate film has less scope and freedom; it needs to tick more specific boxes in terms of set and locations, costuming and plot points.

The height of their popularity was probably in the 1950s. In recent decades a couple of efforts, Cut Throat Island and Pirates, flopped so badly they have gave the sub-genre a generally bad name that it struggled to recover from.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl represented a highly successful reset in 2003 to the extent that the fifth film in the series is about to be released.

Black Pearl’s director Gore Verbinski has had a very hit-and-miss career, his other best films being The Lone Ranger and the animated Rango. In the case of Black Pearl, the energy of director and cast combined with the overall look and visual sweep of the film successfully refreshed an old tale.

Despite the length being laboured by some repetitive battles there was enough cannon fire, black sails, heaving bosoms, swordfights, rum drinking and plank walking to ensure the film was embraced by audiences who had been largely starved of this material since the mid-90s.

Black Pearl has terrific production values and visuals that lifted it a notch above pretty well every other pirate film made to that time. Particularly good was the effect that shows the pirates in a different light when the moon shines on them.

Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, Geoffrey Rush as Barbarossa, Orlando Bloom as Will Turner and Kiera Knightley as Elizabeth Swann all make for a tremendously attractive and energetic cast.

They are well supported by Jack Davenport as the pirate-hunting Naval Commander who is also vying for Knightley’s characters’ affections, and the always interesting Johnathon Pryce as her father.

The other films in the series have had fair to middling reviews, perhaps due to being too much of a good thing, but the box office results still stack up.