If Pirates of the Caribbean was any indication, there is an unmet public appetite for seafaring and swashbuckling, which bodes well for what could be a long series of movie adaptations of the well-loved series of historical novels by Patrick O’Brian. In a way, casting Russell Crowe as a hard-fighting Napoleon-era British sea captain is our dream come true, at least in that our dream is to set him adrift in a small boat in the middle of the Pacific. But we’ll grudgingly admit that he’s well cast as Jack Aubrey, O’Brian’s brave but decidedly imperfect hero. The action is here is actually taken from the tenth book, which has one of the series’ meatiest plots, with Aubrey and his spy/surgeon buddy Stephen Maturin chasing a powerful enemy frigate around South America. Purists will grumble about any number of changes, for instance that the bad guys are no longer Americans, but French-leading us to wonder whether they’re also changing that infamous Churchill quip to “rum, freedom fries, and the lash.”
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