Walt must be rollin'...

Rating: 1/10 (16 April 2009)

I am ashamed to see Disney's name associated with this film. This was definitely not a family movie. It contains graphic violence,gore, perversion, and overall crudeness.
The first scene is the hanging of a small boy and other pirates. You are immediately punched in the face with a disturbing and depressing image. Compared to the rest of the movie this is a tame and cuddly image. However, countless people dangling at the brink of life merely sets the bar high. The rest of the movie is a chaotic struggle to top the previous horrific image. Many children, as well as adults, would find some of it disturbing and hard to take in.
Yet, this reckless display of horror is balanced out with absurd humor that a child would find funny. The movie is riddled with old jokes. To hear yet another and another joke about sea turtles and rum being gone was too much. It is as if the writers said, "it worked before, maybe if we repeat it a bunch of times it will work again." I know that many people enjoy the immature and childish humor that movies seem to revolve around today, but enough is enough!
So who was the target audience for this movie? The overstocked stores of Jack Sparrow dolls tell me children, but the gore and sexuality tells me adults. By exposing the audience to polar themes such as stomach wrenching gore to abstract zaniness the movie is in a constant state of imbalance. They're attempt to rope in as many age groups, only succeeds in disappointment for all ages.
I have seen my share of R rated movies. If there are things in here that made me cringe, I can't image what this doing to the impressionable mind of a child that this is marketed to. Men, women, and children were either stabbed, shot, strangled, blown up, suffocated, mangled, or impaled, to the extent to where death was irrelevant. You can't take away the images once you've seen them, and a child will walk a way, not only confused and disappointed, but because this is such a popular movie they will believe that it's acceptable entertainment.
More offensive than the exploitation of a wide children based audience, was the exploitation of the characters we have gotten to know and love. Several main characters were slaughtered. Sure, death doesn't discriminate, but in a Disney movie, it should. It's more that just "good guys live, bad guys die". A character's death must have a thought behind. Death should not simply be shock value. They were so untrue to the original characters, by the end of the movie I didn't care what happened to them.
Let's start with the "villains", if they can be called that. The super villain Becket, who controlled everyone's fate, justified all of his evilness as being just "good business." That's weak. Becket lacked the *umph* of any respectable villain. Barbosa and Davy Jones were stripped of their dignity and respect they earned in the previous movies. The ideal villain must, to some degree, be feared, mysterious, and above all respected by the audience. In this movie I pitied them.
The heroes suffered the same fate at the villains, death by bad writing. Will Turner was probably the most disappointing hero. He turns out to be a blood thirsty jerk. The force that drove Will in the first two movies was honor and love. The pitiable force that drove him in the 3rd was hate and revenge. His obsession with rescuing his father from Davy Jones turned out to be out of control and pointless. The presence of a strong leading lady, Elizabeth, was replaced by an obnoxious object used simply for sex appeal. All respect was literally stripped from Elizabeth in her first scene. I can forgive the writers for trying to invent a reason for making Elizabeth half naked in a fight scene,(have to keep the males entertained), but I seriously question their sanity when they compromised her as a symbol of sex appeal when she dislodges a particularly large musket concealed in her butt (tacky). The fascinating manner and wit of Jack Sparrow was sadly gone. Jack's exuberant character from the first two movies were always balanced by his cunning sophistication and his random flamboyance. The writers of 3 clearly decided that the audience would prefer Jack at a constant, heightened state of abstraction, and that he would be more marketable as a clown side kick.
The plot was scattered through out the movie, mostly in-between the tedious, lengthy fight scenes. The interesting part of the plot, about the pirate lords from the 4 corners of the earth meeting together didn't get deserving attention. The characters are worse off in the end than when they started off in the beginning of the trilogy. After all the speeches about brotherhoods and loyalty the ending theme is "every man for himself."
Pirates 1, and even 2, had a consistency about them, but 3 was off the map. At the end of the second movie there were many things I expected to be resolved in the third movie. Such as a confrontation of the Captains Barbosa and Davy Jones. To have two actors of such high caliber in the same movie not meeting is criminal. Even at the end there were still a lot of lose ends that were not tied up.
Many people will disagree when I say how disappointing this movie was, but I propose to them that perhaps they, in their minds, just want it to be good. Because the first two were entertaining and enjoyable, they don't want the conclusion of this epic to end on a sour note. It needs to be looked at objectively. I am a huge fan of Pirates and Disney, and I really wanted this to be good. There were not enough good reasons to redeem it.