"Take what you can, give nothing back."

Rating: 1/10 (2 February 2008)

Let's face it, people, we are living in a DARK AGE. Illiteracy, ignorance and religious fanaticism are on the rise, and the arts are everywhere in decline. At best, the cinema was always a lesser art, but at least it once had some claim to be called one. Chaplin, Hitchcock, Ford, Welles, Bergman and Kurosawa are a few names that randomly come to mind. But now we are living in the age of Jerry Bruckheimer, who compares to any of the aforementioned luminaries in roughly the same way that Salieri's footman's chamber pot compares to Mozart. Yes, I know it's supposed to be mindless entertainment, and there has undoubtedly always been mindless entertainment of one kind or another, but how low can human beings descend before they start to devolve back into slugs?
I deliberately waited until the "trilogy" was finished (if it really is finished), and the dust settled, before uttering any comments, if only because I wanted to reflect upon which of the three films was the most idiotic. Unquestionably, that dubious honor has to go to this one. The first movie at least made some minimal sort of sense, perhaps in the same contorted way that an episode of Spongebob Squarepants makes sense. The second was little more than an incoherent mass of special effects, but at least it mostly obeyed the laws of general science, if not physics. But this one! Good god almighty! Saint Edward D. Wood, pray for us sinners in the hour of our lobotomization! So it turns out that the pirates live on a flat earth, and they go sailing off the edge to bring ol' Cap'n Jack back from the land of the dead. Then, in order to return to the land of the living, all they have to do is rock the boat until they flip it over? Really? I had no idea it could be that simple, or that death could be so impermanent. But it only gets worse. I can hardly bear to write about it. Brethren court? Pirate lords? Keith Richards on the way to his twentieth nervous breakdown? If Scheherezade had recited this nonsense to the sultan, he would have had her drawn and quartered on the spot. Please pinch me, slap me, drive nails into my head until I wake up. I used to play better stuff than this when I was three years old. The only "pirate lords" I ever heard of (or even imagined) are the ones that sit in the boardrooms of the corporations that control and periodically emit this kind of brain-shriveling rubbish, and the only "code" they seem to have is best summarized by the quote from the film given above.
Do yourself a favor. Read a book. Work a crossword puzzle. Go for a walk. Sit on the front porch and talk to your neighbor. But whatever you do, protect whatever may be left of your precious gray matter from movies like this. Turn it off right now. Turn it off and leave it off. Turn it off right in the middle of this very sentence I'm speaking.