Shiver me timbers

The latest, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, however, will only increase Disney's stock of doubloons. And it will acquaint a new generation with the golden rules of pirate pictures: nobody dies, they go to Davy Jones's locker; everybody who sails under the skull and crossbones is a crook-backed, rum-soaked lickspittle; it is impossible to overplay a character who wears a big hat and is given to exclaiming, "Aaharrrghh!"

Mysteriously, the official source for this swashbuckler is not the back catalogue of Errol Flynn or Robert Louis Stevenson, but, it is stated, a ride - Pirates of the Caribbean, at Disneyworld. The producers say that the film is "an irreverent wink at the Disney theme-park attraction", which tells you quite a lot about the inside of the average movie executive's head.

For them, a theme-park attraction is not just a long wiggly thing with carriages that should be avoided by pregnant women and Boy Scouts in search of a place to eat their packed lunch, but an object that should be treated with reverence, as if it were Anna Karenina or the Bayeux Tapestry.

Fortunately, from this desperate brief, director Gore Verbinski and his collaborators have crafted a witty and attractive adventure.

The film's cast of buccaneers have wisely been encouraged to avoid understatement like a bout of scurvy. Johnny Depp, as Jack Sparrow, former captain of The Black Pearl, offers a listing, mincing, eye-rolling performance conducted in the same gruff Tommy Cooper cockney accent he employed in From Hell. (Only Marlon Brando, perhaps, could get away with work of comparable eccentricity.)

Geoffrey Rush, as Sparrow's mutinous first mate, the blackguardly Captain Barbossa, plumps for a leering, gurning, throaty number, nicely set off by the snarling macaque monkey that occupies his left shoulder. In the lower ranks, Office alumnus Mackenzie Crook (a pirate's name if ever there was one) is like Tom the Cabin Boy from Captain Pugwash, after years of submitting to unspeakable degradation in the fo'c'sle. A magnificently whiskered Kevin McNally plays safe by doing an impression of Tony Hancock doing an impression of Robert Newton. (I never realised so many vowels could be wrung from the simple word "fog".)

Joining this gang of misfits, there are a couple of relatively normal characters in the film, too: Keira Knightley, the lanky centre-forward from Bend It Like Beckham, is a young woman with something shiny secreted in her corset, around which the entire plot revolves.

Orlando Bloom, with a sweet little bum-fluff moustache, is her blacksmith sweetheart, a boy who has been banging out cutlasses for years, unaware that he is the son of

Bootstrap Bill, a yo-ho-hoer of the first water. (One casting error, however, cannot be forgiven: barring two extras I spotted, the entire population of the Caribbean islands appears to be white.)

Verbinski's team of screenwriters has a sure sense of the absurdity of the genre: Depp's character claims to have escaped a desert island by reining together two sea-turtles with a rope woven from his own back hair; one of his crew is said to have trained a parrot to speak for him after losing his tongue. The director's most impressive trick, however, is combining these larks with a genuine sense of the uncanny.

In the opening scene, a little girl stands on the prow of a ship, singing gently to herself as the vessel cuts through the ocean - and then suddenly stops as she spots an open parasol bobbing silently on the surface-of the water. Towards the end of the picture, he tops this by showing us a very literal skeleton crew, marching stiffly across the seabed to attack a rival ship from below.

Thrills, yes, but more sophisticated twists than any for which you might queue on a family holiday in Florida.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl
Cert: 12A