Awful

Rating: 1/10 (10 July 2006)

Well, it made a record $132 Million opening weekend and that means only one thing: a lot of really disappointed people. I enjoyed the first movie, but I wasn't what you would call a fan. My wife dragged me along to this one and I relented mostly because of the poor reviews for Superman, which I would have rather seen.
Pirates II wasn't funny and it was totally self-indulgent. The editor is a genius, basically because he figured out how to get paid without actually doing any work. Almost every scene without fail had five to ten seconds of crap on each end of the action. The run time was way too long (which could have been remedied with cuts in appropriate places). For an action movie, it doesn't say much that I got bored on two separate occasions, finding myself searching for the remote.
The first movie was redeemed by a fantastic script and solid wit. The sequel had neither. I saw an interview with Johnny Depp in which he claimed to be willing to do "eight of these movies if the scripts remain as good as the second one." LIAR, LIAR, LIAR. I love Depp, but he will forever be a sell-out in my book if he continues to insist that this is a well made movie. I'm totally OK with actors making crap for the money so long as they acknowledge that they did it for the money.
The only thing that could have possibly redeemed this movie would have been extended gratuitous shots of Keira Knightly just standing around or doing basically anything. For a movie that didn't know when to edit a scene, there were surprisingly few of these shots. It also didn't help that at some point near the end of the film, she gained an ugly, obviously fake tan out of nowhere.
All in all this movie was bad, but it wasn't so poorly made as to become entertaining in its badity. This is the worse kind of film to watch. That being said, I'm definitely looking forward to the third one; at this rate it will be exceedingly awful and possibly awful enough to be entertainingly bad.