Gore Verbinski lets peculiar people be funny without making the danger irrelevant. We like his generous approach to adventure, though a good performance often earns more patience than his repeated swordfights deserve.
Fi1m perspective
Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow tries to sound authoritative while barely keeping his speech or his swagger steady. In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Gore Verbinski lets that ridiculousness sit alongside swordfights, sea battles and supernatural danger. We laughed at Sparrow’s slurring, because Depp makes sounding in charge seem to require more concentration than he can spare. Verbinski’s contribution is to give him time without asking the rest of the cast to compete for eccentricity. This is a generous adventure director whose appetite for comedy we like, even when we wish he would get on with it.
MouseHunt (1997), his feature debut, established a taste for visual comedy; The Ring (2002) took him into horror before the pirate breakthrough. Two Pirates sequels followed in 2006 and 2007, then the animated Western Rango (2011). The Lone Ranger (2013) and A Cure for Wellness (2017) belong to a later, more unevenly received stretch. The genres change, but he keeps mixing comedy with danger and favouring outsiders as protagonists. That willingness to risk a peculiar leading character is more interesting than the size of the adventure around them.
His recurring collaborators include producer Jerry Bruckheimer and editor Craig Wood, and he favours practical locations and effects alongside computer-generated imagery. The emphasis on convincing movement makes sense for someone who mixes action and physical comedy. In The Curse of the Black Pearl, though, the warmth comes chiefly from Depp and Geoffrey Rush, and his willingness to let them set the comic pace. Their comic freedom keeps the adventure from settling into routine.
The weakness is his reluctance to stop. The Curse of the Black Pearl runs for 143 minutes, and the repeated swordfights test the goodwill the performances earn. Its thin romance gives us little reason to welcome the extra time, either. More restraint would leave the comedy and the warmth intact. Start with that first pirate adventure, and bring a tolerance for extended swordplay.
Biography
Gore Verbinski is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. Born on 16 March 1964 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, he grew up in Southern California and graduated with a BFA in Film from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1987.
He is known for directing MouseHunt (1997), The Ring (2002), the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films (2003–2007) and Rango (2011). For Rango he won the Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Animated Feature Film.
