A true cinematic mess

Rating: 1/10 (4 August 2006)

******* Contains Spoilers***********
Truly one of the worst A movies I have ever seen. I have not walked out of a movie since "The Owl and the Pussycat" at a college movie night in 1977 but I did tonight. What a horrible, boring, interminably long mess! I sat there for most of the film wishing that someone would make the bad writers go away.
The plot line seems to have been conceived along the lines of "hmm, we have three villains but it doesn't seem to be working, how about if we add a few more, yeah, thats the ticket." Then, when it appears that the large villain count isn't working, we have to throw in some cannibals and a giant squid just to make sure there is enough villainy for all the 7th graders at which this film appears to be aimed.
After two hours my wife and I got up and left. We couldn't stand the boredom. It is insufferably long, bereft of a meaningful plot arc, overly violent for no apparent reason than to appease the aforementioned junior highers, and leaves the viewer with fewer brain cells than he or she walked in with.
To be sure, the film is beautiful to look at, the special effects masterful, the makeup superb, but the acting is average (with Depp failing to supersede his marginal performance in the first PoftheC) and the screenplay gets a solid F. The film looks like it was produced by someone who invested a lot in action sequences and couldn't bear to cut them down despite their debilitating effect on the overall effort.
Three glaring examples come to mind: some of our heros are imprisoned in a sphere made of bones and, despite the fact that the holes in the spheres were big enough for Kirstie Alley to escape through, we had to spend an insufferable amount of time watching our heros bounce down hills inside the sphere, climb up hills in the sphere, walk across fields (ala Fred Flintstone getting his car to start) in the sphere, fall down canyons in the sphere, and so on. If we hadn't seen enough of rolling set pieces with people stuck in them, later in the movie we get even more when another group of protagonists (or are they antagonists? one can never tell) rolls a giant waterwheel down hills, over fields, through jungles, across the water, etc., etc., etc. The producers want us to know that this wheel is not CG so they shoot it from every angle possible including a bunch of ridiculous tracking shots that have the camera rotating as the wheel rotates!! In another scene, the three pro/antagonists have a stupidly long and ludicrous three way sword fight while the damsel in distress tries unsuccessfully to get their attention (and while ignoring the hugely valuable treasure that is stolen out from under her nose). All this while being chased by undead fish people.
It goes on and on. This is one of those films that could have been a lot of fun but wasn't quite fun enough for the test audiences so the producers decided to add more fun until finally it is so darn fun that you fall asleep in the middle from the sheer load of tortuous unending fun that washes over you.
This film may have appealed to some but if you are looking for a good swashbuckler with a great villain and a tight plot line, look elsewhere, this ain't it.