The first movie I ever walked out of.

Rating: 1/10 (1 June 2007)

When I think back to May 18th when I first saw "Shrek The Third," I laugh at myself for thinking there couldn't be another worse film made in 2007. Well tonight I was shut up, speechless, and left baffled as I took my seat at the 7:00 showing of "Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End." I will honestly tell you I only saw the first two hours of the film. At 9:00 I grabbed my value Pepsi and practically ran out the theater door, eager to escape the hell I had so innocently trapped myself in on a valuable Friday night.
There are so many things wrong with this film I don't even know where to start. Just like the third Shrek installment, POTC 3 has lost all--and I mean all--of its charm and has now turned into a 3 hour soul-less bloodthirsty action movie with no character development, horrible acting, very few charming Jack Sparrow moments, and just a bunch of angry sea creature pirates eating each other's heads and stabbing swords through other unlucky pirates' torsos.
The acting was absolutely horrid. Orlando Bloom is in his worst role of his career and gives a painfully annoying performance as Will Turner. Kiera Knightley, an actress who I usually adore watching on screen, was also surprisingly below average and left me wondering what the hell went wrong on the set of this movie. Even veterans Johnny Depp, Bill Nighy, and Geoffrey Rush seemed bored by the whole thing, like they knew the movie sucked but also their contracts with their signatures on it kept them from ducking out of the project.
There's too much CGI. WAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too much CGI. Part of the reason I loved the first film so much was because it was reasonably realistic, no huge sea creatures, no hammerhead shark pirates, no strange women growing 10000x their size, roaring like some guy from a death metal band, and then falling apart into crabs. There was no unnecessary CGI. The third film excels at this, and it almost felt like I was watching a Star Wars film. Unfortunately, the excess CGI takes away from the backbone of the film, and is obviously a huge weight on the film that only attributes to it's faceplant into the ground.
Gore Verbinski really is starting to lose his magic as well. He did an EXCELLENT job directing the first film, and did a pretty good job with the direction of the second film. Why, now, does he deliver a terribly amateurish directing job in the third film? It was almost as bad as the direction in Clint Eastwood's "Flags of our Fathers." The storyline is ridiculously stupid and stupidly hollow, incredibly and overly complex for a fun popcorn movie like this, and Verbinski tries to balance three separate story lines on one plate and ends up dropping the dishes, spoiling the food, and leaving the viewer hungry.
I could really go on and on about what a gigantic waste of time and money this film is, but a movie like this doesn't deserve such a long review. Really, it's a shame Hollywood relies on sequels to big moneymaking blockbusters to rake in the cash these days. Thank God for indie cinema. Save your money and rent the first instead, which is actually a 9 or 10 in my book.