PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN 2 (2006)

Once I got through this summertime juggernaut, it was hard for me not to hold it up next to Star Wars (the first three episodes now cleverly numbered 4, 5 & 6). They seem to come from the same source and I can only close my eyes and imagine a dark room illuminated only by candles in which mysterious robed and hooded men sit at a large long wooden table and chant until the ideas for the next megabudget film begin to appear in the dripping wax. The chanting grows louder as the seated begin to realize how this Summer's film will improve upon past summertime successes: "OMMMM We, the dark lords of the film industry which took The Hidden Fortress into outer space and called it Star Wars, will now turn the space ships into pirate ships and call it Pirates of the Carribean. In this way we will generate billions and insure our continued existence OMMMMMM."

If you stand Pirates of the Carribean up next to Star Wars looming like indestructable twin towers you get this:

Captain Jack Sparrow = Han Solo
Will Turner = Luke Skywalker
Elizabeth Swann = Princess Leia
Pintel & Ragetti = R2D2 & C3PO
Captain Barbossa = Darth Vader
Davy Jones = Jaba the Hutt
the Kraken = the big nasty toothy thing that Jaba the Hutt feeds victims to.

Plotwise, the comparison is a little shakier except that thirty years ago I left Star Wars feeling baffled and bludgeoned and today I left Pirates in much the same state. This time, however, being in the company of my 5-year-old, I concentrated a little bit more on plot points in an effort to be able to answer the barrage of questions I fully anticipated afterwards as he and I dug into a cheeseburger and Bourbon St. Steak respectively at Applebee's.

In the midst of all the overblown CGI tentacled nonsense one thing stands clear: Johnny Depp is a great actor. In particular, he's a great comic actor. And I'm happy to report that billions of years ago when my guilty pleasure was watching 21 Jump Street with my soon-to-be wife, we used to tell everyone "Yeah, it's awful...but keep an eye out for Johnny Depp."

There are moments of real laugh-out-loud comedy in Pirates: the swordfight atop a runaway waterwheel; a three-way joust on the beach between Sparrow and Turner, Turner and Norrington and Norrington and Sparrow; Captain Jack running like a dandy from a huge throng of cannibals; the crew imprisoned in suspended cells of lashed-together bones. And as Richard Schickel pointed out in his recent Times essay, the comedy is in the scenes that contain no special effects. There is a trim, focused and funny movie somewhere in this mess but it suffocates under the necessity to be a huge movie-for-everyone.

CGI looks like CGI and CGI doesn't look real and in 95% of movies employing massive amounts of CGI the suspension of disbelief is impossible. And in a movie that only needs to shiver its timbers with ships, cutlasses, bottles of rum and dead men's chests, the moments of intense and painful CGI grind Pirates 2 to a screeching halt.

Directed by Gore Verbinski (I can't help but wonder if he'll deffect to the X-Men series while Bryan Singer moves to Pirates 3 and Brett Ratner picks up Superman Returns 2), this movie's beating heart is being held captive in buried treasure chest. It seems it requires an enchanted compass to find it.

And to Johnny Depp I offer this question: will you do a comedy that requires only your broad physical gestures, your cleverly modulated voice and your perfect sense of timing to generate laughs? I look forward to seeing that.