Colombo Critic.com

I’ll be blunt: If this film just had Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow prancing around a quaint English cottage in the middle of Summer sipping tea and chatting up the neighbors I would have given it five stars without hesitation. It could have been called Captain Jack Sparrow: The Curse of the Forgettable Supporting Cast and I would have lauded it for its daring truth in advertising. Hell, Jack Sparrow doing nothing else but sitting in a chair staring at the camera for two hours would have still got a three for originality.

The fact that the entire franchise is carried by a single character says a lot about this movie. The rest of this cast is made up of some very good actors, but they feel tired and overused. You only get a few seconds of someone before someone else butts in and steals the limelight. It seems like the creators solution to stale characters is to just keep chucking new ones in as a diversionary tactic. There’s just too many of them and the audience is stretched to the limit when trying to keep track of all of them. This is further aggravated by the need to follow…

…The Plot

Good lord, it’s like Verbinski threw up all over the dailies after a night of binge drinking, slapped on some CG and hoped that no one would notice. Imagine that they had a suggestion box outside every theater that the second film was screened at, collected all the suggestions and put them in one big bag along with all the jokes and plot lines from the first two movies and then blew it up with dynamite. Then imagine that a hundred monkeys were used to pick up all the pieces and paste them together in a little scrapbook which was referred to henceforth as The Script. The end result is 168 minutes of plot twist stacked upon plot twist inserted between several other plot twists all constantly revolving around the core plot… which I’ve forgotten.

And that is the real problem with this movie: In order to truly appreciate this plot you are required to watch it several times over, but to truly enjoy the movie you need to watch it with your brain switched off (and stoned, if possible). So, what you have at the end of it all is a movie which has half an audience enjoying itself in blissful incomprehension and the other half scratching it’s head saying ‘What the fuck was that about?’. It’s not the best way to treat an audience, and it really does feel like audience satisfaction wasn’t high on the list of priorities for this movie, falling well behind the need to make the biggest and mind-blowingly stupendous orgy of a movie possible. And on that last point they well and truly succeeded.

The Orgy of Sound and Light

As you would expect this movie looks and sounds even better than the previous two, which is saying a hell of a lot considering how good the first one was. All the CG, especially the characters is extremely believable. Everything looks like it should and none of it looks like it was put together in a computer, with the possible exception of some scenes involving figures swinging through the air on ropes… though no one’s really pulled that off properly yet anyway.

The action really and truly needs to be seen to be believed and you should watch this movie just for these. Just remember to switch off your brain before the movie begins or you’ll soon be distracted by the plot and miss the real beauty to be had in this film: The Superficialities. Yup, that’s pretty much all this film has left apart from Depp. If Johnny wasn’t prancing around or you didn’t have those amazing action scenes then there really isn’t anything left. Even Orlando Bloom looks like a boring wet rag and Knightley is too grubby and greasy and that look just doesn’t work for her.

In Conclusion

This movie would have scored higher if it was the first and only movie in the series. But it’s the third in a series that’s stuck on a downward slope. In my opinion they should have stopped with the first, because that film was close to perfection. Sparrow’s entrance on his sinking boat rates as one of the most charismatic and obnoxious scenes I’ve ever scene in any movie. This film rates low because it already had the ingredients to be great, but chose to sacrifice everything in the service of a franchise. So, the only real Pirates here are Disney who blast the movie-going public with one monster of a broadside and walk away with over 3 Billion Dollars. The audience is left barely afloat with one movie and two barely digestible excuses for sequels for their troubles.

The rum is really and truly gone.