The Pirates of the Caribbean movies may all star Captain Jack Sparrow, but the iconic swashbuckler’s pre-series past is rarely touched on — except in a key scene cut from the first film. Released in 2003, The Ring director Gore Verbinski’s adaptation of the Disneyland ride Pirates of the Caribbean did not seem set to do big business when it arrived at the box office. The first major pirate-themed movie since the infamous flop Cutthroat Island eight years earlier, The Curse of the Black Pearl seemed doomed to unimpressive reviews like the year’s earlier theme park ride adaptation, The Haunted Mansion.
Instead, the Pirates of the Caribbean wowed audiences and critics alike and proved a surprising delight, with Johnny Depp’s career-defining turn as Captain Jack Sparrow in particular winning acclaim. However, while Sparrow was charming enough to carry the middling Pirates of the Caribbean sequels to box office success, the character was never given a compelling backstory in-series.
The first film in the Pirates of the Caribbean series established Jack as a feckless, happy-go-lucky antihero but originally, the movie hinted at a darker edge to his life of crime. There’s a missing moment from the original version of the scene wherein Jack and Elizabeth are stranded on a desert island that added some pathos to an otherwise upbeat character. When Elizabeth accuses Jack of exaggerating his “grand adventure” which consisted of “lying on a beach drinking rum,” she questions whether there’s any truth to his ferocious reputation. At this point, a hurt Jack exposes his arms and a torso covered in a maze of scars and pithily retorts “none at all.”
It’s a strangely dark moment for a character who became famous for his devil-may-care attitude, but it’s also one that the increasingly zany character could have done with to help ground Depp’s Sparrow. As the Pirates of the Caribbean series wore on, the movies received increasingly worse reviews, many of which noted that there is little in the way of stakes in the later installments as Will and Elizabeth’s fate is no longer relevant and viewers are all too aware that Jack can survive anything. As proven by countless tragic near-immortal characters over the years such as Superman and Dr. Manhattan, a fictional figure can be able to withstand any amount of life-endangering adventure without losing the interest of viewers.
However, the fact that Jack Sparrow never seems fazed or shook by his misadventures, combined with the fact that the lovable antihero seems incapable of dying, makes it hard for many viewers to care about his continuing story in later Pirates of the Caribbean sequels like the plot-hole-riddled Dead Men Tell No Tales. While there’s no need for an edgy reinvention of the character, keeping in a subtle but forceful nod to Jack’s tragic past would have deepened the character and rendered him more human and easier to root for without pulling viewers out of the over-the-top world of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
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