Here are six pirate movies that should satisfy the skeptics as much as the would-be swashbucklers. This isn’t to say that Michael Haneke or Gaspar Noe need to make pirate movies – if they do, I’m there regardless – but there are plenty of ways to bring the brutal business of being a pirate and the not-so-ignorable elements of society that can produce such thrill-seekers that don’t also involve a Kraken. Much like cowboys, the legacy of pirates is still primarily romanticized myths, ones that often evade confronting the amount of rape, murder, and cruelty that went into the trade. There are, however, a number of great movies that look squarely at the moral tug of being a career criminal on the high seas without tipping over to unmerciful cutesy horseshit. They also require patience for Johnny Depp’s faux-drunk chicanery that evaporated from my being around the time the first Arcade Fire record came out.
This tactic makes for plenty of good vibes and the veneer of a “darker tone” but the movies themselves suffer from tonal imbalance, a tonnage of backstory, and explanatory dialogue. Pirates of the Caribbean occasionally makes allusions to the darker side of the life of pirating but every time it looks like Jack Sparrow has truly dicked somebody (or some thing) over, it’s revealed that he was playing the long con or that some celestial being has conspired for him to pay his moral debt in some all-important way.
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