Aye, me hearties! Never doubt Johnny Depp

It seemed like an incredibly stupid idea. And that is why it was so brilliant.

Johnny Depp, who'd made a career out of being allergic to mainstream movie stardom, decided to star in a Disney movie based on a Disney amusement park ride, starring that skeletal girl from Bend It Like Beckham and that pretty blond elf boy from Lord Of The Rings.

Buena Vista Pictures Read reviews of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest."

It seemed like an insane 180-degree lurch to the extreme, as if Ann Coulter had joined the Democratic Party and started volunteering at the Clinton Library gift shop. This guy won't talk about his admittedly cheesy but fine work on 21 Jump Street, but he's gonna gladly follow in the footsteps of The Country Bears? What the...?!?

Turns out that Johnny, who reprises his role as the delightfully skeezy Captain Jack Sparrow in this Friday's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, knew what he was doing all along. I apologize for questioning that. Instead, I should have figured that the man who broke my heart in Donnie Brasco and Blow wouldn't have been involved if he couldn't have wrung something subversively comic out of a Disney movie.

Make that Oscar-nominated subversively comic. With dreadlocks, no less.

Only a genius could take a comic-relief pirate in a family movie and turn him into a campy, sexually ambiguous, boozily joyful looter and pillager right under the watchful eyes of God and Mickey Mouse. Not only that, but Depp, gold grill a-blazin' like the Original High Seas Gangsta, somehow made Jack Sparrow simultaneously repugnant, family-friendly and regrettably hot.

And I say this as a woman who has, for years, maintained a strict No Gold Teeth policy. Not to mention that I'm generally anti-Men Who Don't Appear To Have Bathed This Year.

But that Jack Sparrow is a sexy mother swashbuckler (hush your mouth!)

I shudder to think what any other actor would have done with Captain Jack. The temptation might have been to go too cartoony rough and tumble, like Kurt Russell in Captain Ron, or too irredeemably icky, like Kevin Costner's urine-swilling fish boy in Waterworld, or just too Captain Hook arggh-tastic.

It's a weird role, right? He's not the romantic lead — that's Orlando Bloom and his dreamy-swoony curls and ocean-deep eyes. He's not really the villain — that was the awesomely crusty Geoffrey Rush in the first movie, and octopus-faced Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) this time around.

Then again, he's not really a hero, either, being resolutely committed to any activity that gets him the most amount of spoils with the least amount of effort. He's not just a bad boy — he's an un-conflicted bad boy. And that's hot. Sorry.

Even though you're supposed to root for lovebirds Will (Bloom) and Elizabeth's (Keira Knightley) true wuve, the first film's sexiest scene was when the drunken Jack and Elizabeth are flirting up a storm. I think the aim is to be skeeved out, like "How dare he proposition this chaste, plucky good girl so obviously fated for someone cuter?" Instead, there's a confident gleam in Jack's eye, even as Elizabeth's backing away, because he knows that even in her sweetness, there's a part of her that's drawn to that combination of virility and vileness. He knows it, she knows it, and what's more, he knows that she knows it.

And that's something the freshly scrubbed Elfy McHero can't get anywhere near. I seriously doubt all that was written on the page, because Repugnant Hotness is an organic thing.

We've all heard that Depp channeled the dirty-hot boozy swagger of Rolling Stone Keith Richards in his Jack Sparrow performance, and I see that. But there's a playfulness and a lucidity that elude late-era Keith and his dangling ciggie. Captain Jack may have sea water and rum running through the veins where blood used to be, but even in his goofier, buffoonier moments, he seems mostly in control.

And so does Johnny Depp. How did I ever doubt him? Forty lashes for me.