FilmBlather.com

Pirates have gone out of style, and that is beyond unfortunate. There is no better ready-made plot out there than that of a pirate movie, and in the hands of the right people, a wonderfully campy swashbuckling adventure can emerge. But camp isn't exactly fashionable nowadays -- we've drifted more in the direction of sneering irony -- and so the genre has mostly gone the way of the musical.

The musical, however, has recently made a big comeback, thanks in large part to Chicago. With any luck, the heavily hyped release of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl will do the same for its namesake. Though based on a Disney World attraction -- usually a bad sign -- Gore Verbinski's pirate movie is everything a pirate movie should be, and probably more. In a more general context, rarely do we see a summer blockbuster so loose-limbed and spontaneous.

It is possible to see this movie as a winking parody, but I prefer not to, and I trust you will permit me to persist in that delusion. The plot is utterly fantastic, yes, but it is fantastic in both senses of the term; what prompts me to take this movie more-or-less seriously, in fact, is that it almost flawlessly obeys its internal logic. The script, by veterans Terry Rossio and Ted Elliot, is written with an eye toward making sense, and for a movie about invincible cursed pirates, that is no mean feat.

There's a love story in here too, and despite taking a back seat to the swashbuckling action, it still manages to be a hog's head above the token romances in most Hollywood movies. It works because the script doesn't push too hard, and because the actors who perpetrate it -- heartthrob-of-the-moment Orlando Bloom and Bend It Like Beckham's Keira Knightley -- resist the temptation to go for "cuteness." Bloom plays Will Turner, a lowly blacksmith trying to curry favor with Elizabeth Swann (Knightley), the governor's daughter who is all but betrothed to the recently promoted military Captain Norrington (Jack Davenport).

Elizabeth has in her possession a mysterious piece of Aztec gold coveted by the sailors of a ghostly pirate ship ominously titled the Black Pearl. It seemed that they stole and spent the gold some years ago, not aware that the gold was enchanted to damn its thieves to an eternal limbo between life and death, making them unable to feel any pleasure or pain, and unable to perish. The only way to lift the curse is to recover every single piece of the gold, and, bizarrely enough, spill pirate blood on it.

Enter Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), the ex-captain of the Black Pearl who was abandoned on a deserted island and given a gun with one bullet just before the rest of them committed their immortal sin. He escaped and saved the bullet for his former first mate Borboso (Geoffrey Rush), who oversaw the mutiny. When Elizabeth is kidnapped, Will springs Sparrow from prison and in exchange, Sparrow takes him to the Black Pearl, where he will try to get her back.

Oddly enough, I have only now decided that Johnny Depp is a genius; most others reached that conclusion long ago. Without indulging in the least hyperbole, I'm unilaterally declaring this his best performance, so intricate, so effortlessly funny. If you take your eyes off of him for a second of his screen time, you are likely to miss something that would have made you laugh. His entrance may be the greatest movie moment all year; I still chuckle when I think about it.

Depp may be the best thing in Pirates of the Caribbean, but he can't be accused of "rising above the material"; the material is right there with him. This is a great story, filmed more than competently by Verbinski, and acted with gusto that only very self-secure actors could have brought. Geoffrey Rush tears into his villainous role with a truly frightening voracity; I feared that he would physically tear Depp, Bloom and Knightley to pieces during their scenes together. I love it when actors plunge headlong into roles like this, which is maybe why I think Ian McKellen is one of our greatest actors, living or dead.

A whole lotta stuff happens in the final reels, but it all somehow comes together coherently, which sealed the deal for me. I live for this stuff. Pirates of the Caribbean is high adventure, high comedy and high camp.