Entertaining, But Too Long

Rating: 6/10 (9 December 2007)

The good and bad of this third - and perhaps last - of the "Pirates of the Caribbean' story:
It's not easy to keep people entertained these days for almost three straight hours, and the film-makers accomplished two-thirds of that. I might have ranked this higher, but it's too long at 169 minutes (almost three hours) .....way too long. Two hours would have been more than enough for this fantasy-adventure film. After that, I found myself getting bored with too much action and much of the same things I had already seen for two hours.
What I really appreciated in this movie was all the humor. I expected decent special-effects and diverse characters. There are a number of good laughs in here and they are provided by a variety of people, not just Johnny Depp as "Capt. Jack Sparrow." Even the parrot gets several laughs in here.
Since the entire cast was still intact, I was more interested in seeing some new faces and I really enjoyed Chow Yun-Fat whose major contributions came in the beginning of the film. Why he basically left after the opening part, I don't know, and the movie suffered for it. Mostly the film features a bunch of familiar people, none of whom we can predict what they'll do next. One minute they are good guys; the next minute, the bad guys. Unfortunately, that makes the story confusing in parts. So - if you got lost a few times, don't feel bad. It's understandable.
The only character who rubbed me the wrong way was the too politically-correct and almost insulting role of "Elizabeth Swann," played by Keira Knightley. Why do filmmakers insist on giving us the pretty girls-who-beat up-all-the-men roles? It's so stupid. Overnight she becomes a super-skilled swordsman? Please, movie makers: stop giving us Rambo with makeup and cleavage! Let women be women and men be men!
Also, I wanted a high seas pirate adventure story, not some voodoo theology mumbo-jumbo, which took up too much of this story. What was this: Pirates of the Caribbean or Harry Potter? At times, it resembled more of the latter.
Geoffrey Rush as "Captain Barbossa" was the most interesting person in the film, in my opinion. He was terrific in every scene. Depp is always good, but I missed hearing him say, "Savvy?" He didn't say it once!
Overall, fun but overdone. Savvy?