[Ooh! Sudden inspiration for updating the Scientology wedding vows... "girls need tender care... a swashbuckle, a talking parrot, perhaps a cheeky monkey." Oh yeah. Sign me up!]
But I digress. Pirates of the Caribbean II has all of these things. It has a boat, a chest, a bosom, lots of swashbuckle, a talking parrot, a cheeky monkey, and an intrepid dog. It also has a compass, a key, cannibals, a voodoo queen, and the evil kraken. It has even more awesomely evil bad guys than the first one. In human form the British Navy is replaced by The British East India Company, which hasn’t had a good starring evil role in simply centuries and more’s the pity. Forget Enron and Halliburton. The British East India Company invented uber-national corporate malfeasance. In supernatural form it’s Davy Jones and his minions who are a special effects masterpiece: living, walking, talking, growing coral reefs in human form. Utterly gross, scary, and fun.
Orlando Bloom. What a name. Now that the days of sexy bad boy poets have gone, what else could the poor boy do but become an actor? Orlando does a masterful job at whatever it is he’s supposed to do. Keira Knightly wields her sexy so fiercely I worried someone might lose an eye, although clearly the teenage boys in the audience did not mind. Spoiler alert! There’s a cliffhanger ending, which means you’re going to have to come back next year to discover how it all turns out. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it’s not with them all dead by suicide pact at the bottom of the sea. After all, this is Disney and Disney knows that the ride is crap unless you exit panting to stand in line to ride it again.
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