After seeing Pirates of the Caribbean and enjoying it greatly (an opinion that Mike Whybark shares), I came across this keyboard (via the ever-industrious Amy Langfield).
As for the movie itself? It's a great deal of fun. Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush compete to see who can chew more scenery (one movie critic dubbed Depp's performance "The Lavender Pirate"). Orlando Bloom (Legolas in LoTR) and Kiara Knightley (the blonde tomboy in Bend it Like Beckham, brunette here) are appropriately pretty all the time and appropriately dashing when the script calls for it as the straight leads. The marvelously talented Jonathan Pryce and Jack Davenport are, unfortunately, wasted in relatively minor roles as a colonial governor and a British commodore, though Davenport has moments here and there when he realizes that he's in far over his head.
I'm not entirely happy with the ending (for one thing, it misses a wonderful chance to pay homage to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly), but it's still a wonderfully fun couple of hours at the movies.
Amen to the ending being overly improbable, and I second yor nods to Pryce and Davenport - although Pryce fails to actually show us his hapless Governor as a real person, while we clearly glimpse a genuine, if idealized, portrait of a British Naval officer in Davenport's role.
Which is part of why the ending rang false. Indeed, overall, the film's chacterizations were unexpectedly sound, distinctly deeper than we'd any right to expect.
I beleive a turn through Treasure Island as the standard by which these things are judged might prove illuminating.
I notices, I do beleive, in the single, high-angle shot of Isla de las Muertas, that the Island appeard to be the contracturally-obliated form of a skull and crossbones, though I might well have imagined it..
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