Buy the Cliff notes first. More complicated than King Lear.

Rating: 5/10 (27 May 2007)

an hour after watching this nearly three hour affair, my girlfriend and I are still trying to puzzle it out. Unfortunately, we would have to see the film at least three times to solve the puzzle. Is that what Disney wants? See this movie three times and eventually you will understand how Calypso, a heart, a monkey, a branded "P", a key, a storm, a map, Davy Jones, A boat, a first mate, a fake eye, bad teeth, dead people, living people, and everything else fit together. Because I can not understand what happened. By no means is this a finale. Nope. I expect at least one more sequel and definitely a prequel. They will drain this cash cow until it evaporates in the Caribbean sun. A spectacle? Oh, yes. Not since King Kong has there been such a spectacle. Visually it is jaw dropping. Just kindly forget that as a terrific battle takes place inside a hurricane the two armies just hang out and watch. What are they doing? Why did they show up? My head was spinning. I sympathize with the children in the audience who were the actual demo Disney targeted. There is not a chance in the world that those kids understood even 1/4 of the many different plots and sub plots. There were incredibly subtle touches of betrayal and back story that are neither resolved nor justified. They involve events that can only be explained in a flashback or in a 2.5 hour flashback called a prequel. If you take a ten minute conversation and set it in an exotic jail cell aboard a ship...you still have a ten minute conversation. I sensed the writers had modeled their approach after Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Arc. There is humor and a brazen attitude, heroics are matched by cowardice. Etc. But never in the three Indy films did two characters prattle on for ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes about minute details of their past. In fact, one conversation that takes place in Pirates includes more dialog than THE ENTIRE INDY series! I love dialog, but when that dialog actually contains tiny clues and subtle hints of emotion and past sins, then it lifts me out of an "action adventure" film and plants me in...a "drama". Note to Jerry Bruckheimer: don't mix genres. I just don't know what market he was aiming for. No 13 year old is going to catch a sexual organ metaphor and no 30 year old is going to laugh at a monkey getting shot from a canon (though I did chuckle). I'll see the fourth and the fifth film when they arrive, but these writers need to learn the value of the delete button. If there were notes to this film then I want them. Maybe I'll understand what happened then.