Disappointing, but judge it for yourself

Rating: 2/10 (13 November 2009)

The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was a welcome return to the action/adventure genre and was a movie that I thoroughly enjoy watching. The second movie was not as good as the first, but fun nevertheless, a few minor flaws, but nothing that was not forgivable. This movie, however just takes the rip completely.
I will organise this movie's flaws by way of points.
1) The opening scene. The film opens with a bunch of pirates (including a child) being hung. I gather that this was to establish the darkness of this movie, but how exactly is it darker than it was in the previous movies? They hung pirates in the first movie, so how is this worse?
2) One scene involves Eliabeth finding her dead father on the way to Davy Jones' locker and tries to save him, but the voodoo woman does not let her. Um....why not? They brought Barbossa back from the dead, and they are about to bring Jack back from the dead, so how is this different?
3)Chow Yun-Fat. Chow Yun-Fat is NOT in this movie. He appears briefly at the beginning and once again at the end, barely doing or saying anything. It would not have bothered me if he was supposed to be just a cameo appearance, but no. This movie was marketed as starring Chow Yun-Fat, he appeared in the trailer, on posters, on the sides of buses and even on the cover of the DVD. It reminded me of when Darth Vader was put on posters for Revenge of the Sith when he was barely in it (I mean the actual Darth Vader, not Hayden Christensen). Chow Yun-Fat was in this movie for nothing more than publicity.
4) The locker. The whole scene with Jack in the locker was flat out ridiculous. Jack is there with the Black Pearl. But wait, why would Jack still have the Pearl if Davy Jones spent the whole of the last film trying to get it off Jack? Then Jack gets out the Pearl and for no reason starts trying to move it with all his might. Then a million crabs come to life and start moving it for him. I watched this scene in total disbelief that this scene had actually been written by someone and made it past production. It was just ridiculous and non-sensical.
5) The pirate's code. I know that the code was touched upon in the first movie, but it was referred to and I quote ''more like guidelines than actual rules''. So why have these guidelines transformed into a full-blown code that all pirates live by? And why would pirates want to live by a code anyway? They live a life of freedom and lawlessness, so why, why would they have all these rules? They even have a big meeting and establish several 'lords'.
6) The boring-as-hell pirate's meeting. This scene was so boring, repetitious and redundant that it may as well not have been in the film at all. It got the film nowhere, it had no payoff and should have been completely removed from the film during editing.
7) Not faithful to the source material. We all know that the Pirates of the Caribbean films are based on the Walt Disney World ride, which I myself have experienced on several occasions. In the first movie, the writer's had been heavily influenced by the ride and managed to transcend the fun of that ride onto the audience. The second film did this to a forgivable lesser extent. However this film bears no resemblance whatsoever to the ride and captures none of the imagination or fun of the ride or the previous movies.
8) Redundant special effects. The special effects in this movie obviously had a lot of work put into them, but the effects themselves were absolutely ridiculous. Case in point, one scene involves the voodoo woman growing to enormous size (somehow managing not to crush the relatively tiny ship). Then she shouts something incoherently and, get ready for this, I kid you not; she dissolves into a million tiny crabs and vanishes into the ocean. Where is the sense in this scene? Where is the logic? I really should be typing in all capitals here, but IMDb disapproves. This scene was ridiculous, non-sensical and above all, retarded.
9) Length. I think that saying a film is too long is a bit of a lazy criticism, I mean look at The Godfather or Lord of the Rings. These movies can weigh in at up to 3-4 hours long, but captivate us nevertheless. This movie is just under three hours long and trust me, it feels much longer. The pacing of the movie is atrocious and a large number of scenes simply go on far too long.
Some people live by the logic that if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. So I must give the one thing I thought was okay in this movie. The acting. The actors in this movie give their best efforts with the preposterous script that they have.
This movie grossed around 950 million dollars worldwide, which is typical of a blockbuster sequel. However I was surprised to see how many people actually liked the movie. You may be one of those people, who right now is sitting awe-struck in front of their computer thinking ''why are their people like you in the world?''. If you are, then fine. I am just giving some warning to those who have not seen the film yet.
I rate this movie at 2/10. The only reason it does not get a 1/10 is because of the efforts put in by the actors and special effects artists. Rent it and decide for yourself.