You can put lipstick on a pig but its still a pig

Rating: 5/10 (26 May 2007)

You know those wax deserts that they bring out at restaurants like Johnny Carino's and Red Lobster. They look really good, but try taking a bite out of it and all you get is a mouth full of wax. That's how Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End made me feel. It has amazing visuals. Duh. Every special effects movie made from here to the end of eternity is going to have amazing visuals. If you haven't noticed by now nerds with computers can do some really cool stuff if you throw enough money at them. Back in the 90's good visuals could carry a movie, like say, Independence Day, but they can't do it any more. In the past 10 years we've seen people fly and dodge bullets in slow motion, we've seen New York City destroyed in a disturbingly large variety of ways, we've seen the armies of Rohan ride to the rescue of Gondor crushing orcs under foot, we've seen every imaginable object or animal anthropomorphized from toys, to cars, to penguins several times over. All that to say you can't just impress me with visuals anymore. I demand a story I can follow and enjoy; is that too much to ask of a good movie? I'm not asking for Dickens, not even Tom Clancy, just a passable story that an intelligent person can follow. Pirates doesn't give me this. And more than that, it takes lovable characters and diminishes them by placing them into this joke of a script. You know why the first Pirates movie was good? I didn't know a person who sat down to watch it who didn't like it. Now 90% of the audience is walking out of the theaters scratching their heads.