The curse of the pirate movie may be over. After box-office fiascos like Roman Polanski's Pirates and Renny Harlin's Cutthroat Island, director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer successfully revive this once-glorious genre with the fantasy-adventure Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Despite its derivation from a Disney theme-park ride, this is one of the more engaging of the summer blockbusters, thanks in large part to a clever screenplay by Shrek writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio and devilish performances by Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush. A supernatural element also stirs things up. The plot revolves around an ancient Aztec curse which has doomed the wicked Captain Barbossa (Rush) and his pirate crew to sail the seas as the undead, their true skeletal forms revealed only in the moonlight.
The curse can only be reversed once they return every last piece of the treasure they plundered--and the one piece they need is a medallion in the possession of Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), the spirited daughter of a Caribbean island governor. When Barbossa kidnaps Elizabeth, his ghostly ship the Black Pearl is pursued by the British naval vessel the H.M.S. Interceptor, which has been commandeered by the unlikely team of motley pirate Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp) and Elizabeth's childhood friend, blacksmith Will Turner (Orlando Bloom). The Interceptor is in turn trailed by the H.M.S. Dauntless, led by Elizabeth's outraged fianc, Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport).