That's the case with Luc Besson's Angel-A, a French-language fantasy about a petty, skuzzy criminal at the end of his rope and a statuesque, chain-smoking blonde who may be his guardian angel, or a screwball slut, or neither, or both. Once in a while, though, a notion will be fertile to begin with, and a self-renewing source of delight. Movies often turn on slender notions worked up to look like full-fledged ideas. Or, perish the thought, you could see the movie. To learn more you could check out the movie's Web site.

The story is about other things, of course, but the plot's absurd complications defy description. And Keira Knightley's Elizabeth Swann and Orlando Bloom's Will Turner go through the tortures of the damned in their search for love - if the story is about nothing else it's about betrayal. Geoffrey Rush is back as Barbossa, and a good thing too, because his diamond-drill voice is one of the few that can cut through the movie's clamor. Chow Yun-Fat does a turgid turn as a Chinese pirate captain. Keith Richards is there in the leathery flesh, but very briefly, and to no effect. Jack Sparrow is less of a presence than before, though Johnny Depp remains the saving grace of the series. Still, the most affecting effect is one of the simplest - Bill Nighy's octopus-faced Davy Jones wiping away a single tear with the tip of a tentacle. Those doldrums are relieved from time to time by spectacular effects - white rocks turning into crabs crabs by the digital thousands covering the Black Pearl's deck, a climactic sea battle fought on the rim of a ship-sucking maelstrom. I liked his courage, wondered what he'd done to deserve such a fate, and would have preferred his presumably brief life story to the cruel and unusual punishment of a ponderous pirate saga, 168 minutes long, with more doldrums than The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Now, nothing in this bleak sequence has any bearing on the rest of the film the whole thing is there only to make the point that civil rights have been suspended and all pirates are to be hanged. When other prisoners take up the boy's melody, a British officer rushes off to tell his superior, cryptically, 'They've started to sing, sir.' A line-up of prisoners with ropes around their necks includes a grim-faced little boy who looks like the hero of Oliver, and relieves his anxiety by bursting into song. The very first shot, of a hangman's noose, is followed by what promises to be a musical about capital punishment in the 19th Century. Stumbling out of the theater after the new Pirates of the Caribbean had run its semi-coherent course, I thought about the movie it might have been.

Film semi pirates