The never-ending story

Rating: 4/10 (2 May 2012)

I actually enjoyed the original 'Pirates of the Caribbean', with its hilarious account of Captain Jack Sparrow, the world's worst pirate. For sure, there was an element of fantasy in the story, but only in the sense that in the world of the film, all the old sea-farers' tales were actually true. But Hollywood loves a sequel (or three) and so we come to this monstrosity, a film characterised by preposterous metaphysics, an un-followable plot, bewildering computerised animation and unendurable length. It's a sign of the film's self-indulgence that Sparrow, its best character, doesn't even appear in the first half-hour; while every supposedly moving moment could have been cut and pasted from any other blockbuster. It seems that Hollywood must kill the things it loves; usually through an overcooking process that takes away whatever made an original film good and replaces it with pointless, generic bombast. If there's a metaphorical black flag flying over this film, it's sadly not a pirate one.