Long (keel) haul

Rating: 3/10 (17 February 2012)

I quite like theme park thrill rides. Most of the best rides condense the excitement into ten minutes, however watching this dramatised fun-park attraction for nearly three hours felt like being trapped on a big-dipper interminably and that, even to a white-knuckle fan like me, is way too long.
The plot is convoluted beyond belief, characters die, come back to life and then die yet again for barely credible reasons, leaving me confused as to what was and wasn't real. The production strains for bigger and better effects as it goes, from a ship that moves on millions of crabs, to Jack's multi-personality split, to Calypso's giantess metamorphosis, to the final ships' battle on the edge of a raging maelstrom, they just numbingly keep coming at you, interspersed with lots of deliberately exaggerated ham acting and weak attempts at humour.
The actors all have a great time, as you'd expect although it's odd that the likes of Geoffrey Rush, Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom all seem to garner more screen-time than the headlining Johnny Depp although any reversal wouldn't have made much difference. Rolling Stone Keith Richards actually steals the show with his cameo, but of course he's not acting wasted and decadent because he is already,
All told, it just didn't work for me at all and I felt at the end like I'd endured over two hours of being hit about the face by a wet fish.