Word: depp
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...that was then, and this is now--now being the era of, to take a convenient example, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Like the first Pirates three years ago, the sequel, which opened last week, pits Johnny Depp against something like a hundred million bucks' worth of special effects. He can't hold his own against them...
...shame because Depp is a skilled comic actor. His Captain Jack Sparrow is still a marvelous creation. It's not just a matter of his eye makeup or his variously funny ways of walking, running or sitting still (as when he discovers, to his dismay, that cannibals have decided to make him the main course at their banquet). It's also that Jack is, in truth, a modernist, unaccountably displaced to the 17th century and obliged to undertake the mindless heroics not only of an antique movie genre but also of the spirit of an age when all are heedlessly...
...times Depp nails the subtle touches that make for classic comedy. When he's miming alarm or confusion, for example, he does terrific things with his eyes. Sometimes they're bright with half-formed schemes. Sometimes they're addled with a flickering panic he can't entirely hide. In those moments he takes us behind the conventional hero's stoic mask and allows us to see Jack for what he is: a presexual child pretending to be a man of decisive action and romantic élan. You might say he's the anti--Errol Flynn...
...These are ripoffs, not homages, but they are also emblematic of a movie that is essentially a special-effects extravaganza . It is, I think, a universal truth of movie making that effects are never funny. They can sometimes wow you, but they can't make you laugh, and Depp cannot stand up to the hubbub they create. No actor can. He can only serve them, which involves him in derring-do that any actor could do about as well as he can. He needs to be involved with us, not with the lunking machinery of the movie. When, for example...
...Well, you say, maybe Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man?s Chest wasn't supposed to be all that funny. Maybe the fact that Depp decided to be brilliant was an unintended blessing bestowed on the original production, which the sequel is sort of stuck with. He was so good, doing, as he confessed, his imitation of the piratical Keith Richards, that he grabbed the reviews that brought in, as an unexpected increment, a crowd of grown-ups looking for some wit in an unlikely place - the multiplexes in summertime. This new film lends a certain credence to that supposition...