Today two
action films invaded the stately art house that is the Cannes Film Festival. In
line with the Festival's policy of keeping the slate of pictures competing for
the Palme d'Or pure and rigorous, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and the Chinese picture Wu Xia were relegated to Out of Competition slots.
But
each film generated plenty of attention. Pirates gave French folks out for a weekend promenade a
chance to see Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz walk up the 23 red-carpeted steps
into the Grand Palais screening. And Wu Xia is just a damn fine movie, with a clean vigor to its live-action martial
artistry that makes Kung Fu Panda,
by comparison, look like Kung Fu Pander. Here, Richard Corliss offers his thoughts on a
blockbuster-to-be. In the next post, Mary Corliss will review the
blockbuster-that-ought-to-be. LOW TIDE
The
foppish brigand Jack Sparrow (Depp) is searching for the mythical Fountain of
Youth described by Ponce de León, and asks his scurvy dad Capt. Teague (Keith
Richards) if he's ever encountered that mythical pool of regeneration. Teague
sneers, "Does this face look as though it's been to the Fountain of
Youth?" and Jack, after a pause, replies tactfully, "Depends on the
light."
The fiery
Angelica (Cruz), every curvy inch Jack's equal in wooing and marauding, accuses
Jack of having take erotic advantage in an earlier encounter. "How could
you say I used you?" Jack sputters. Angelica: "You know very well
how. Jack: "Yes, but how could you say so?"
Toward
the end, Jack executes some daredevil maneuver requiring a bit more courage
than he's accustomed to mustering. "Everyone see that?" he asks the
onlookers. "Because I will not be doing that again."
And
there, ladies and rogues, are the three brief flashes of wit in the 2hr.17min.
fourth episode of Jerry Bruckheimer's Pirates of the Caribbean cash
cow. Based on one of the tamer Disneyland rides, the original film in 2003
boasted a bright insouciance that revived the swashbuckling genre once
inhabited by Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. Two heavily laden sequels
followed, and by 2007 the three films had purloined $2.7 billion at the
worldwide box office. That, not any need to expand the basic story or enrich
the characters, guaranteed this slow-moving vessel that sends Sparrow swanning
across the high seas after a four-year absence.
With Rob
Marshall (Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha, Nine)
replacing Gore Verbinski at the directorial helm, and Ted Elliott and Terry
Rossio aboard again as scriptwriters, On Stranger Tides has
Jack tangling with his old nemesis Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) and two new privateers,
the fearsome Blackbeard (Ian McShane) and his first mate and possible daughter
Angelica. On the way they encounter a naïve young preacher (Sam Claflin) and
kidnap a mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) — Stranger Tides' token
young lovers.
Walking
down the Croisette after seeing the movie, I ran into Richard Peña, who runs
the New York Film Festival. "Why so glum, chum?" he asked. I must
have worn a scowl, since nothing depresses me more than a movie designed for no
other purpose than to give familiar pleasure. If I bear a grudge against this Pirates,
it's because its caretakers have frittered away the buoyancy of the original
film. Stranger Tides doesn't rethink and reboot the franchise,
as Fast Five did for the Fast and Furious series.
Instead, it plays like an episode of a long-running sitcom in its
seventh-season, autopilot phase. It lumbers through most of its action
set-pieces, and the addition of 3-D in some scenes sparks only the corniest of
sword-in-your-tummy effects. The mood is leaden and perfunctory, as if most of
the folks involved were laborers in a Chinese factory, knowing that if they
make a product, no matter how slipshod, people will buy it.
"I
am just as bent as ever," Sparrow proclaims. "Hellishly so."
Depp's acting is indeed bent, ever teetering like a vaudeville-sketc drunk, but
an elegant one. In the vivacious first chapter, the roguish coquettry of Depp's
performace was the wild card, as the other actors (Rush, Jonathan Pryce, Keira
Knightley and Whatever-Happened-to-Orlando Bloom) played it more or less
straight, faithful to the demands of this antique genre. Here, though, his
eccentric style has moved to the center; virtually all the male actors are as
fruity as our Prince of Tides, and poncier than Ponce de León. Gone
is the scurvy majesty Rush exuded in earlier episodes; now he growls like a
Regency fop with dyspepsia. That gigantic, magnificent actor Richard Griffiths
seems ready to explode with sneering pomposity as King George. Other top
British stars are wasted: Roger Allam in a courtier role, Judi Dench in a
10-second cameo. Cruz (who, like Dench, graced Marshall's ill-fated Nine)
looks great and finally shows how her Latina allure might fit into Hollywood
superproductions; but at today's showing in the vast Lumière Theatre, her thick
Spanish accent often was muffled under Hans Zimmer's pounding score.
In the
years since the first Pirates, Depp's career has made its own sea
change. Before 2003 he was the dreamboat of gnarly, indie-minded films like Benny
& Joon, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Tim Burton's Edwartd
Scissorhands and Ed Wood, Terry Gilliam's Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas and his own fascinatingly obscure directorial
effort The Brave, which played here in 1997 and was hardly seen
again. Depp occasionally honors his weirder roots, in films like Sweeney
Todd and Public Enemies; but since he lucked into the Pirates smash,
he has been concentrating on movies for kids — perhaps for the entertainment of
his own children with French actress Vanessa Paradis. Like a fond dad, he might
want to make enough money to put his children through college. With the bundle
he's made from Pirates, though, Depp could buy one for them. So now it's time
for him to again lavish his talent on films for grownups, and not pre-school
pabulum like On Stranger Tides.
Source: Time
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