Best film performance by Johnny Depp since he became Captain Jack (no cameos)

jeezus christ how depressing.

Sweeney Todd but barely.

I have only seen four of these, basically have to vote for Rango.

Dillinger, unenthusiastically.

I've only seen one of these (Public Enemies).

seen two, lol

Secret Window was amusing, probably even more so now that Johnny Depp couldn't make a B david koepp movie if he wanted to

I didn't hate his Willy Wonka as much as a lot of people did, but I also remember little about it

and Sweeney Todd was death but more cuz I just don't get that sondheim stuff

going with Mort.

hahahaha well shut my mouth, koepp is directing Depp next year in an action thriller named Mortdecai

Juggling some angry Russians, the British MI5, his impossibly leggy wife, and an international terrorist, debonair art dealer and part-time rogue Charlie Mortdecai (Depp) must traverse the globe armed only with his good looks and special charm in a race to recover a stolen painting rumored to contain the code to a lost bank account filled with Nazi gold.

good christ

true lies meets thomas crown meets national treasure meets the da vinci code meets tinker tailor soldier spy

L-R: Johnny Depp, Ewan MacGregor

http://images.wikia.com/lossimpson/es/images/b/b9/Raging_Abe_Simpson_and_His_Grumbling_Grandson_in_The_Curse_of_the_Flying_Hellfish.jpg

His good looks

http://cdn03.cdn.justjared.com/wp-content/uploads/headlines/2013/11/johnny-depp-begins-filming-mortdecai-in-london.jpg

Gwyneth is playing the impossibly leggy wife

i thought 'public enemies' was good, albeit mostly for other reasons. but i guess depp was good as dillinger. he's a lot closer to nic cage than depp stans would like to imagine.

even accepting that the silent majority apparently liked alice in wonderland, i dunno how after this run

Frank Tupelo/Alexander Pierce in The Tourist
Paul Kemp in The Rum Diary
Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows
Tonto in The Lone Ranger
Dr. Will Caster in Transcendence

depp still has stans

Wow. To think that there was a time I'd watch anything he was in largely because he was in it.

other non-cameo roles in the pipeline are The Big Bad Wolf in Into The Woods, Whitey Bulger in Black Mass and the Mad Hatter in Alice 2: The Search For Johnny's Gold

i remember 'corpse bride' fondly, that's about it.

ugggghhh, I had no idea there is going to be an Alice 2.

I have only seen five of these; his Sweeney Todd was fine.

Dark Shadows is an utterly wrongheaded, gratuitous thing, but he is amusing in it.

http://www.scandalist.com/files/2009/03/metalyears.jpg

He turns up in too many documentaries. As I mentioned on some other thread, he's like the default Hollywood guy if it has anything to do with the '60s (past Peter Coyote, that is, who was at least there).

his cool cachet is starting to slip

wait a sec...i just realized johnny's hat is ripped

there was a whole media hubbub about him wearing a torn hat at vmas and red carpets and whatnot recently...and no one realized this has been his steez since youth.

philistines

The Mortdecai books are really great and fun, and now I am pretty depressed that they will be made into a terrible movie with Johnny Depp. (fwiw, he does not have a wife in the books, either, just a butler.)

Mortdecai is not supposed to be attractive either, he's basically a gone-to-seed drunk.

rango over sweeney todd. dark shadows would've been such a gimme for depp and burton once upon a time. sweeney todd was such an unlikely success i almost wonder if a burton/depp version of into the woods might be preferable. the marshall one will be mediocre but passable, the burton one would've either been decent or a fiasco. maybe a 30% shot at a B isn't worth risking a C+, i don't know. wasn't once upon a time in mexico post-pirates?

yep, by a few months. damn wikipedia clowns.

jeezus christ how depressing.

yup. not a single thing worth seeing really (I have seen a few)

thought his singing was horrible in Sweeney Todd. out of the ones i've seen here i don't think i'd thumbs up any of them

what was his last legit great performance, pre-Pirates? Maybe being harsh, and I haven't seen them all, but I feel like it's Dead Man or Donnie Brasco...

pre-capt jack filmography:
1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street Glen Lantz Film debut
1985 Private Resort Jack Marshall
1986 Slow Burn Donnie Fleischer TV film
1986 Platoon Lerner
1990 Cry-Baby Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker
1990 Edward Scissorhands Edward Scissorhands
1991 Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare Glen Lantz Cameo
1993 Benny & Joon Sam
1993 What's Eating Gilbert Grape Gilbert Grape
1993 Arizona Dream Axel Blackmar
1994 Ed Wood Edward D. Wood, Jr.
1995 Don Juan DeMarco Don Juan/John R. DeMarco
1995 Dead Man William Blake
1995 Nick of Time Gene Watson
1996 Cannes Man Himself Cameo
1997 Donnie Brasco Donnie Brasco/Joseph D. Pistone
1997 The Brave Raphael
1998 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Raoul Duke
1998 L.A. Without a Map Himself/William Blake Cameo
1999 The Ninth Gate Dean Corso
1999 Sleepy Hollow Ichabod Crane
1999 The Astronaut's Wife Spencer Armacost
2000 Chocolat Roux
2000 Before Night Falls Lt. Victor, Bon Bon
2001 Blow George Jung
2001 The Man Who Cried Cesar
2001 From Hell Frederick Abberline
2003 Once Upon a Time in Mexico

Ed Wood

Fear and Loathing is fairly stupid but he's good in it. Ditto Sleepy Hollow. After that gtfo

i'm sure there were earlier instances missed in my youth (don juan demarco seems likely) but chocolat was the first time i had the sense that depp seemed unnecessarily satisfied with himself onscreen

The Libertine is a decent film

i really like Wilmot's poetry which has made me wary of watching the movie even tho i kinda want to

It's imperfect but I appreciated how wet/grimy they made Restoration England.

I like Depp's opening monologue in it

i really like Wilmot's poetry which has made me wary of watching the movie even tho i kinda want to

same here--was annoyed that a collection of his poems I have has a non-removable fake sticker on the cover that's all 'NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING JONNY DEPP'

Some great looking stuff in that film, he looks oddly amazing when his health is failing and face showing blood.

the ladies are better prepared to answer whether the Depp Star is hot when he uses accents. In his own way he's created a male niche kind of Meryl Streep career.

i liked his VO in the Hunter doc.

which is to say

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOHCjGhy6vY

Dark Shadows was fun i guess

See, I liked "The Lone Ranger" quite a lot, but was it too bound into American history for the US to like it?

The Lone Ranger was considerably better than I expected. Still not actually good.

i got a text from my son after he saw it that said "The Lone Racist" and that's alls i know

lol

Was he uncredited in 21 Jump St? Cos that's a lot better than anything here I've seen.

(No cameos)

i think i might've liked bad singing more than Depp's Bowie impression. it's the sound of him more than the absence of chops that i find underwhelming

Kinda weird that we can't actually vote for Captain Jack, which presumably prompted all of this crap, but which in itself is a pretty fucking entertaining performance that elevates an okay if too-long filler pirate movie to a pretty funny, energetic too-long filler pirate movie. The sequels saw very rapidly diminishing returns on the schtick, and he may well have been replaced by CGI in the one with Penelope Cruz, but I rep for the first one.

i left it out cuz i thought it was more interesting to see his filmography without four of those things clogging up the list

wisely saved first Pirates movie for library disc, bailed after a headachy half hour

saw it at the movies with children, threw one of them thru the screen when the pirates sailed back to the same island for the 3rd or 4th time i dunno the red mist was down by then

Yeah, it seems have been first written forwards from a story outline, and then backwards from "but we already filmed this action sequence, if we cut that part of the plot, what will we do?" It just has too many double-crosses and double-double-crosses, especially for a kids' movie, should have been caught on the first draft. But I was entertained enough to actually go see it a second time in theaters when a different group of friends was going.

The classic film 'goof', one of the invading pirates yells "Geronimo" as he swings from boat to boat.

enjoyed the first one alright, depp and rush were fun in it, there were some fun action set pieces, it felt old fashioned in a welcome way, and it was far far far better than any could've expected from a gore verbinski adaptation of an amusement park ride. after that they seemed to think they were making an epic, or several epics it was such an incoherent mix of dumb mythologies, the fun was drained out and they became ridiculously tedious. as verbinski-depp collaborations go i'll still take rango.

Totally. First one would have been a great and well-remembered fun summer flick, except that the second two are almost Matrix-level in terms of dispersing any goodwill through piled-up Macguffins, extra characters, characters racing each other to nowhere and back, mystical gibberish and action padding in order to make the second two movies a "set" of some kind. If there had to be a sequel, they should have taken a deep breath and eased off on the "everything must be a trilogy" thing, come up with a good one-movie story about some pirates (not necessarily the same ones) and let that be that. There was nothing more to gain by more Jack Sparrow except overexposing him and ruining the fun, and there was nothing more to learn about any of the rest of the characters. Bill Nighy was fun but had nothing to really do but flop around and gurgle at people.

Gutsy thing would have been an all-new cast and story and bet on the audience trusting the brand to deliver, not Johnny Depp, but pirate fun. I couldn't believe it when they made a fourth one years later, and really can't believe that it's one of the top-grossing films of all time, as I never talked to anybody who gave a shit about seeing it. Predictably they're making a fifth one which means that Depp will have been doing this kooky one-off role for thirteen plus years.

the last pirates was the least successful domestically but HUUUUUUUGE foreign

2011 was a big year for "i can't say i know anyone who repped for that" movies - Transformers 3, Hangover II, The Twilight Movie With The Wedding, Pirates 4, Cars 2 and Sherlock Holmes 2 all in the top 10.

(i took fast five, mission impossible 4 and thor out as movies i've heard someone rep for)

(oh and The Last Harry Potter)

you ppl know a lotta pantswetting reppers

yes, we have friends

Better:

http://200movies1woman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/the-pirates-band-of-misfits02.jpg

Can't remember if it's better:

http://theadventuresoftransman.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/1734_mm4998rfue.jpeg

We just watched Muppet Treasure Island the other night. It was okay, couple of really good gags (mostly in the songs), but not better than the first Pirates flick. Tim Curry's mugging is pitched well for the kid-level audience; I'd have accepted him in a re-cast Pirates sequel. As a kid I remember liking Shipwrecked okay, can't remember anything about it though.

i'm ok w/ that movie now but man few movies have disappointed me as much as yellowbeard did at the time

enjoyed the first one alright, depp and rush were fun in it, there were some fun action set pieces, it felt old fashioned in a welcome way, and it was far far far better than any could've expected from a gore verbinski adaptation of an amusement park ride. after that...they became ridiculously tedious.

― balls, Monday, August 4, 2014 11:42 AM (1 hour ago)

sums it up for me. did enjoy the first one a hell of a lot, even on the 2nd pass.

when I rented the first one eleven years I couldn't believe this was a two-hours-plus movie. I couldn't recommend it because it was too damn long and the material sucked and it was obv padded.

Pirates 2 overall really isn't that good, but that whole sequence with the water-wheel really is the best sequence of the whole series. I might also be nostalgic for the days when movie executives thought a trilogy was as far as a franchise could go.

the problem with a lot of trilogies today is that they really should be one movie (cf. the hobbit series) and there are a lot of "trilogies" that end up being four movies with the last two padded out, like "why make 900 million domestic when you can make 1.2 billion" i guess is their way of thinking.

Even though he keeps making them, Johnny Depp is a little bit confused by the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. "They had to invent a trilogy out of nowhere," he candidly tells EW about the last two movies. "It was plot driven and complicated. I remember talking to (director Gore Verbinski) at certain points during production of 2 or 3, and saying: 'I don't really know what this means.' He said, 'Neither do I, but let's just shoot it.' This guy is this guy's dad, and this guy was in love with this broad. It was like, 'What?'" If those movies eventually made sense in postproduction, Depp admits that he wouldn't know it: "I did see the first one. I have not seen the second one or the third one."

yeah, I remember coming out of the movie theater having liked Pirates 2 and I'm almost certain it's exclusively because of that water-wheel fight sequence, which is possibly the best action sequence I've seen in a movie in the 00s.

xxp

I'm amazed anyone found the first film fun (only one I've seen), I thought it was unusually bland even for an action blockbuster. The idea of a rip-roaring ghost pirate adventure sounds spectacular but it was a total slog. The fork in the rolling eyeball and "you can trust a liar to be dishonest" line were the only brief points of interest for me.
I'd love a good fun pirate movie but I've never heard of one yet.

I once saw a quote from Keira Knightly saying she and her co-stars thought the film was "shit" and that they were doing it purely for money. I wonder if it was real.

i think for fun pirate movies you've generally got to go back to the '40s iirc. the most recent awesome seafaring film is 'master and commander' obv.

still so pissed that that didn't turn into a series w/ tons of sequels, etc.

potc makes me think of beetlejuice where you have this one crazy performance that dominates the film but the main character doesn't actually appear until half an hour in & gets relatively little screen time. The difference is that in beetlejuice there are a whole load of other fun performances and stuff to keep you entertained, potc is like a beetlejuice where every other part of the movie is dogshit

dissing johnny deep via comparison to a burton-winona movie: that's how it's done

u gotta compare like with like

I saw pirates at the cinema (it was the "surprise movie" at a festival) and it was better than I expected but I tried to watch it again when it was on tv and the tedious bullshit you have to put up with for 30-minute stretches while you wait for another bit of depp/rush schtick was like fuck this

I wrote a piece eons ago about big-budget porn, hinging on the porn "Pirates" (not a parody), and basically pointed out how many of the "PotC" beats (har) it more or less got down, from the FX to the script to the acting, all on a pittance (relative to H'Wood though huge for porn). It was less about the ambition of the adult industry and more about the laziness of Hollywood.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

The best pirate movie of the recent years is Treasure Planet, which didn't really deserve to be a flop.

The Aardman / Defoe Pirates is magnificent, I'd see it 2 or 3 more times at the cinema just to look at different parts of the screen each time and look for characters and gags crammed in, if I could

I once saw a quote from Keira Knightly saying she and her co-stars thought the film was "shit" and that they were doing it purely for money. I wonder if it was real.

I once listened to the Knightley / Miles Out Of This Life commentary on the first PotC and subsequently imagine Davenport could have that opinion, but doubt Knightley has the self-awareness

I should have my kids see that. I think I saw an early screening of it eons ago, and don't recall it being terrible. Do kids read "Treasure Island" anymore?

xpost

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/88/Captain_Blood.jpeg/220px-Captain_Blood.jpeg

Cool, I see Rathbone is in Captain Blood too.

Used to love The Crimson Pirate when I was a kid.

My fave Pirate movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZyWlcPt2IY

caught most of sleepy hollow last night, the last burton i have real fondness for. seems unfairly slighted, i've seen it grouped in passing w/ truly terrible burton like wonka or alice. i'm not sure if it's due to the somewhat poor script or it being the moment ppl realized christina ricci isn't much of an actress, but it looks fantastic, there's a fun embrace of darkness and gore, and there are enough moments that feel like it was made by the same guy who did pee wee's big adventure and beetlejuice. depp is alright in it, he lapses into cute mannerisms but there's some actual acting as well. i'd take it over anything listed above as well as pirates.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

only two with no votes!

The best film probably won, though I guess you can't really credit it's greatness to Depp. (He is good in it, though.)

caught most of sleepy hollow last night, the last burton i have real fondness for. seems unfairly slighted, ...but it looks fantastic, there's a fun embrace of darkness and gore, and there are enough moments that feel like it was made by the same guy who did pee wee's big adventure and beetlejuice. ...i'd take it over anything listed above as well as pirates.

― balls, Tuesday, August 5, 2014 11:13 AM (12 hours ago)

otm. easily burton's best looking film, w/ much of the credit likely due to emmanuel lubezki.

"Transcendence" is the worst movie I've seen in a while, simultaneously super-dumb and super-self-important. Not even fun, just a glum lump of a movie with terrible acting from Depp and Rebecca Hall.

Looks like nothing new but well done:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie/black-mass/review/820013

Wasn't keen on Out Of The Furnace but at least there are no Afflecks in this one. Kind of looking forward to it, but have been disappointed by recent critically acclaimed Boston Crime movies, they don't make 'em like Eddie Coyle any more!

Aint that the truth, love that movie