A couple of good friends from out of town are in for a couple of days, and we decided to go see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
I didn’t like it. It wasn’t that it was bad, it just seemed like both the studio and the editor went nuts a few times. First of all, it too way too long to get to things. There were some great battle scenes that too basically the entire movie to get to. Then they lasted way too long. At a certain point I really just stopped caring about the characters at all and wanted to finish the thing up so I could go home! We also waited throughout the entire credits to get to the scene that is after it. Waste of time there, sorry, but while it was an interesting reveal, the 30 seconds of footage wasn’t worth the 10 minutes of credits we sat through.
It did have it’s good points though. The characters were still great, the cameo by Keith Richards was fun to watch, and there were some good snappy funny lines (though sadly not as many as the first one).
The main problem with this movie was they seemed to want to push way too much into it. Aside from the problems of the intertwining “who is betraying who” plot lines, it seemed almost like the director was sitting there saying “we have to have a scene with a giant whirlpool”, and “lets give some wonky mystical explanation for this character here”, and “make sure that we have a scene with Jack Sparrow fighting Davy Jones on a mast…. in the rain…. while they’re in a frickin’ whirlpool!” (at this point I imagine Gore Verbinski (the directory) falling to the ground gasping for air). The trivia on imdb says they started filming without a finished script if that tells you anything.
Yet it was still a fair enough movie! Action, pirates, great special effects, and wrapping up the whole second movie (fairly) nicely. My recommendation though is to see it on DVD if you have a decent sound system/TV set, or on cheap night at the local theater.