Pretentious, overlong film which departs from swashbuckle genre into sprawling fantasy epic.

Rating: 5/10 (4 June 2007)

I enjoyed Pirates 1. It was an unpretentious swashbuckler which was a cut above the average. Pirates 2 and 3 have departed from this genre and attempted to create a Harry Potter-cum-Lord of the Rings fantasy epic which fails to satisfy. Plot, character and well-paced action have been sacrificed to special effects and mumbo-jumbo. The Jack Sparrow character, so well-crafted by J.Depp esq., gets lost in an over-elaborate and impenetrable story-line. The writers are guilty of extreme self-indulgence.
Aztec curse I can live with. Characters from Greek mythology, Land of the Dead, Davy Jones, The Flying Dutchman, etc., etc. have been cobbled together into an unbelievable supernatural mishmash. Pirates 3 was much too long and must leave a lot of children baffled and disappointed. I know of one who walked out before the end.
I was intrigued that Chinese pirates were to be included in this film and bitterly disappointed at the result. A more realistic inclusion of Chinese or Barbary pirates could have taken the film into (literally) uncharted waters of pirate fiction. A rich multicultural tapestry could have resulted. But the Chinese dimension added nothing at all to the film.
I suppose I wish that the writers had researched pirate history more thoroughly in order to produce a more realistically-based story-line. The over-complex screenplay severely damaged the entertainment value of the film. The moral must surely be, 'Don't change genres in mid-trilogy.'