Taking a joyride without leaving your cinema seat

The action comedy Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl raises one of the most overlooked and important cinematic questions of our time: Can a movie maintain the dramatic integrity of a theme park ride?

In this case the answer is -- sure. The director Gore Verbinski's penchant for logistics -- combined with the producer Jerry Bruckheimer's desire to spend like a drunken pirate when it comes to putting everything on screen -- melts into an often frenetic, colorful and entertaining comic adventure that often seems to be using Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as a template. The dazzling, high-flying silliness is quite an achievement. The movie is better than it deserves to be, given its origins: a ride at Disneyland and Disney World.

Verbinski's staging is as vertiginous as an amusement park ride and places the wiry and beauteous tomboy Keira Knightley at the center. Her physical assurance suggests what Nicole Kidman might be like if she didn't spend so much time coughing tragically into handkerchiefs in an equally tragic pursuit of important roles.

Knightley is Elizabeth Swann, owner of a medallion that gets the plot going a scant hour into Pirates. This trinket is first seen in a prologue sequence, in which little Elizabeth steals it from an equally young Will Turner. She has also stolen (sigh) his heart, as Will (Orlando Bloom) grows up to be a stalwart blacksmith -- and more than able swordsman who nurtures a secret crush on her. Knightley is strident and confident in her movement, an ability that makes her all the sexier and alluring, which is fortunate, given that her acting skills aren't quite as devastating as her looks.

The movie belongs to Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow the pirate, a rapscallion who's as woozy as someone who has endured much too much time on a roller coaster. Depp doesn't get the opportunity to display his gift for comedy often, and his mellow, dizzied underplaying here is a balm, an antidote to the raucous battles and swashbuckling.

Gargling his consonants before spitting them out, Depp's pirate suggests a man who has spent either a great deal of time with Keith Richards after a tour of the Rebel Yell factory, or a man who has spent a great deal of time watching Mike Myers do his Keith Richards impression.

Either way, festooned with dreadlocks and braids in his hair and beard, and wearing enough industrial-strength mascara to indicate that Captain Jack was probably influenced by another King of the Wild Frontier -- Adam Ant -- Depp offers a ratty, bedeviled turn that keeps the picture in motion during that extended period when there's not much plot involved.

But when this protracted state of narrative lassitude suddenly shifts, Pirates brings in enough story line for several movies. And in the words of Bart Simpson, it takes a knife-wielding maniac to show us the way: in this case it's the entrance of the pirate Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush, who's nearly as game -- and gamy -- as Depp).

He kidnaps Elizabeth because of the medallion. (There's a side benefit. "She's the governor's daughter," one of Barbossa's hearties cackles.) The medallion turns out to be an enchanted piece of gold, which, with the blood of a special someone, can free Barbossa and his swabbies from their curse: they're the larcenous undead whose skeletons can be seen in the moonlight at night.