It must be exhausting, looking for an escape route every time you enter a room. I’d never caught Captain Jack Sparrow doing that before Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but there’s a new director at the helm this time — Rob Marshall, who made the musical Chicago — and I guess he wants you to be aware of his action choreography.
So in setting up an early Captain Jack escape from a palace interrogation, Marshall draws your attention — and Johnny Depp’s — to the respective positions of a window, a chandelier and a gilded chair. Only then does he find an excuse for Depp to swish into action: an exchange of insults with the foppishly overdressed Captain Barbosa, who’s now a royal flunky, that ends with Depp kicking food off a long banquet table, hurling that gilded chair through a window, swinging from the chandelier and eventually ending up on the street.
There, he evades British soldiers by plunging into an 18th-century version of rush-hour — horse-drawn carriages, coaches and coal carts zooming every which way as Depp leaps from moving roof to moving roof. It’s the kind of thing you can imagine Gene Kelly turning into a real tour-de-force, except he’d have insisted on doing it in one take, not with stunt doubles and chopped-up editing. Still, it’s frenetic, and that’s all most Pirates audiences expect any more, right?
Apart from choreographed action, here’s what’s different this time:
Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley are gone. Can’t say I miss them, but apparently the producers thought someone might, so they’ve been replaced by an equally bland chaplain (Sam Claflin) and mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey).