End of the World

I just thought this needed archiving for posterity. The best laugh I've heard for ages...

An uninterrupted 10-minute Mark Kermode review rant on the new 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End' film from last Friday's Simon Mayo Show:

SM: Mark, what did you think of the new Pirates movie?

MK: Well, I think it's important to say that one has to go into these things with an open mind.

SM: Yeah, right.

MK: No I know, but look, okay, historically the first Pirates movie was absolute bilge.

SM: Wrong.

MK: No it was, it was rubbish, and it ended up taking $1bn worldwide which was really, really terrifying. The second one was kind of worse because it was longer and it was a holding pattern because it went on for, like, 150 minutes and nothing happened. I mean a bunch of stuff happened, but nothing actually happened, just a bunch of stuff happened.

And then when it came out on DVD I said to everybody: you know you should boycott this movie; if this stuff does well it's your own fault. Then it came out on DVD and I was told this terrifying fact that it was the fastest-selling DVD of all time. Somebody, maybe you [SM], said, that on the day that it was released, 1 in 5 DVDs that were sold was Pirates of the Caribbean 2. So now we have the opening weekend, this weekend, of Pirates 3, because obviously it's starting to preview on Wednesday, and we've already been told by the industry [that] the prediction is that this is going to be the biggest box office weekend of all time...

[…]

So you sit down. Okay. We're here for 168 minutes.

The film starts off with a hanging sequence, a sequence in which a whole bunch of people are hanging, including an underage person, but probably the most misjudged opening of any allegedly family-friendly movie I have seen in a long time. You're sitting there thinking: they've totally lost the plot; they've decided to go dark for the third Pirates movie - what on earth are they playing at? This is not something that needs to go dark, this is something that needs to lighten up; this is something that actually needs to be entertainment. No, we have this really long, really sort of drawn out, really completely out of place, hanging sequence at the beginning. BBFC guidelines, I looked it up, says 'contains moderate horror and action adventure violence'. It contains completely inappropriate darkness at the beginning that is absolutely out of kilter with the rest of the film and has no right being there. Fine, so, we get through that…

Then, after the opening sequence, the plot, or, more precisely, the plots start. And, if you remember any of the plot threads that were at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean 2, it's like well, somebody's got to go off and find a heart, somebody's got to find an island, somebody's got to get a treasure map, somebody's got to get a compass, somebody's got to sing a song, somebody's got to stand on their head and turn around 38 times. That Orbloondo Land's got to go and find his dad for some reason that is not clear to anybody other than the fact that that Stellan Skarsgard is clearly picking up the cheque and he's a great actor so I'm happy that he's employed.

So, it starts. And it goes on a little bit, and I'm thinking you know I'm really dreading the moment that Johnny Depp is going to come along and do that Keith Richards impression that we all know wasn't funny the first time, and really wasn't funny the second time. And here we go: he's going to do it a third time.

And then the movie plods along, you know Kiera Knightley and Orlando Bland and all the rest of it all happening, and no Johnny Depp. It's 35 minutes before Johnny Depp actually arrives on screen. And I'm starting to think that this is really clever, 'cos what they've done is they've realised that Johnny Depp is so terrible in the film that they're withholding him, they're withholding him because actually everything else in the film's going to be better without him, but no, 35 minutes in Johnny Depp turns up, but not just one Johnny Depp - 10 Johnny Depps turn up at the beginning. There's a brilliant line in Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is referring to Arthur Dent meeting up with [Ford Prefect]: he says he's one of those people that you couldn't see him for months at a time, but then as soon as you saw him he was immediately annoying.

And Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is exactly that; he's immediately annoying squared, he's immediately annoying to the power 10, because there are ten of him, and there's a little bit of business about, oh, Johnny Depp's dead, but he's in the underworld. All this stuff seems to exist purely to show off that fact that they have got a special effect that can turn a stone into a crab. Great, brilliant, marvellous, not enough to hang a feature film on but, hey, well done to the special effects guys.

Then they escape from the underworld that he got in to at the end of the last movie 'cos I think Kiera killed him, but I can't quite remember, there was something to do with a Kraken. But then they all get together and they say ok: off we go on the various plot strands again. And it's business as usual.

There's actually one line in this when somebody says "one person has the ninth piece of eight", which is just about as coherent as any form of plot synopsis gets. On the INDB trivia page, it says the most amazing thing about Pirates 3 is that they started filming without a completed script. No, they finished filming without a completed script, so they just ended up with like a montage of bits; a whole bunch of special effects; a little bit of him doing that, a little bit of everyone else, and they just stuck them together in any order. They didn't cut any of it out, just said there's 168 minutes, shove it out into the cinema and everyone will buy it because everyone has clearly had some kind of terrible joint lobotomy, so nobody any longer has the guts to stand up and say "this is absolutely terrible and what are we doing here? Actually, we should walk out of the cinema and go next door where they're showing 'Zodiac'".

However, Johnny Depp is the least of the problems. Let's start with Kiera Knightley. Clearly, Kiera Knightley's agent has been speaking to the scriptwriters and saying 'look it's fabulous, we're really pleased that Kiera's back in the movie again and obviously it's wonderful. The thing is, up until now she really has really been window-dressing and what we really think is that Kiera needs to sort of expand her role and why don't we make Kiera a pirate, because I think really she could pirates?

So, through the most ridiculous contrived plot device, Kiera Knightley actually ends up being king of all pirates in all the world, ever. So Kiera Knightley, King of the Pirates. This means that Kiera Knightley has to do two things: firstly, she has to do the pirate 'Yar-Harr-Harr', but of course when Kiera Knightley does it it's 'Yah, yahh, hello haar, haar har', then she has to do a rabble-rousing speech which is basically like that speech that Mel Gibson does in Braveheart about 'they can take our lives, but they can never take our freedom', only when Kiera Knightley does that speech, it basically sounds like the head girl addressing a convention of fifth-formers on prize-giving day at the end of term. So Kiera, disastrous: given more to do, messes it up dreadfully.

And then we have the magisterial talent of Orloondo Bland. Now, there has always been a problem with Orloondo, which is that very early on, the script had a relationship between the Kiera Knightley character and the Orloondo Bland character. Nobody at that point realised that the minute you got Orloondo Bland on screen, nobody would care what happened to him. He's so wet, he's so drippy, so completely ineffectual that nobody cares about him. So in the second one, there was this sort of attempt to make the Kiera Knightley character somehow interested in the Johnny Depp character, because everybody else in the audience, other than me, was interested in the Johnny Depp character and kind of didn't care what happened to Orloondo Bland. So this time, we have to take Orloondo Bland and take some kind of interest in him. Now he's acting this love interest against Kiera Knightley. Now Kiera Knightley's acting has always been wooden. This time it is like a petrified forest of woodenness, I mean you really feel like you could build a very nice piece of IKEA furniture out of her performance. It's that bad. And when she and Orloondo Bland are on screen together it's like watching two chairs mating, I mean there's a scene where they have to kiss, and it's like 'what is that? Is it a nest of tables?' No, it's Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knighley having some sort of red-hot passionate embrace that is positively teaky. You feel like you need to get out the varnish and varnish it. Now, I'm going to give away a plot point now. If you're going to sit through Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (and never was a film more accurately named), turn your ears away from the radio now:

'Cos there is a moment towards the end of this film in which it is contrived that Kiera Knightley can get married to Orlando Bloom, but she can only see him for one day in every ten years. I'm sorry, but if somebody made me that offer, I would take it right now. If somebody said to me if I marry Orlando Bloom you won't have to see him again for another 10 years: do you take this man? Yes absolutely; I would take him right now, if I only have to see him one day every 10 years, sign me up, because I don't think I can stand another moment of sitting there in the cinema watching this dribble-some bore waltz around like somebody out of a Milk Tray advert. What the…? How on earth has he become the prominent actor he has? I mean, he killed 'Kingdom of Heaven' stone dead and in this he's actually got worse than before.

And then… we have the mighty Johnny Depp performance. So Johnny Depp started off doing this performance as basically Keith Richards, although actually he wasn't really doing Keith Richards as far as I could tell, he seemed to be doing David Bowie around the period of the 'Laughing Gnome'. Everyone says 'oh, it's a great impression of Keith Richards', but it didn't, it sounded like David Bowie (as Bowie:)'Hello, I am the Pirate King Jack Sparrow''. That's not Keith Richards, that's David Bowie.

But the big gag with Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is – guess what – Keith Richards is actually going to turn up. So you sit there and you fall asleep, and you wake up, and you fall asleep, you stretch your back a little bit, you feel most of your lower body starting to go numb. Then about two hours of the way through, Keith Richards turns up. And here's how it goes: Keith Richards goes 'Hrrrr hrrrr', and Johnny Depp goes 'Hrrrr hrrrr' and then Keith Richards goes 'Hrrrr hrrrr'. If you thought Johnny Depp was bad at being Keith Richards, then you see Keith Richards trying to be Keith Richards. I mean there was a ripple of a sort of appreciation in the audience which, as far as I could tell, was entirely for the fact that Keith Richards was still alive. At all. But he's even worse at doing an on-screen Keith Richards than Johnny Depp is. And between them, there's this sort of this incredible in-joke: 'Oh, it's so funny - Up until now I've been doing Keith Richards, now here he actually is'. No, No. All of you. All of ... The Rolling Stones. Don't care. Go away. I never want to see the Rolling Stones. I don't ever want to see another Pirates of the Caribbean movie, despite the fact that at the end of this there is a door left open for there to be another one.

The whole thing goes on for ever. I added this up, right? First movie: 142 minutes, second movie: 150 minutes, this: 168 minutes. I make that the best part of 8 hours of my life. Stanley Kubrick went from the beginning of civilisation to the dawn of a new breed of human being in just over 2 hours. This has taken them 8 hours to get from Point A to Point A. It's enough. It has to stop now.

And, really, if you pay money to go and see Pirates of the Caribbean, it's your own fault, and you're bringing down the collapse of Western civilisation. And I had a feeling in my waters that actually Gore Verbinski was going to pull it out of the bag and do something that would make me have to say I am wrong, but, you know what? I am so right. I am so right. It is so bad.

==

Genius. Absolute genius.