Another Hollywood Sham

Rating: 2/10 (10 July 2006)

Once again, moviegoers have been bamboozled by Hollywood and the always painful art of turning a very successful and well-made movie like The Curse of the Black Pearl into a 3 part movie franchise that belies the legacy of the first movie. The ghosts of The Matrix: Reloaded return in this god awful sequel to one of my favorite movies that does nothing in 2 hours and 45 minutes but set up a 3rd movie and make your bag of popcorn turn cold.
For the first 30 or 40 minutes of the movie, I was entertained in being largely reminded of how much I liked the first movie of this series. By the time the lights came up in the theater, I wanted to throw something at the screen. That being said, the studio who produced this is genius because no matter how much this second movie has been destroyed by the critics, it would take tremendous self-control not to see the third POTC just to get ANY sense of closure. There was absolutely nothing resolved in this movie except 150 minutes of consumer manipulation.
The most frustrating part was that all the pieces were in place: great special effects (that went a little past unsettling at times), the same great cast, and a pretty good plot setup. It appears, however, that Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio are much better at adapting screenplays than actually writing one themselves. I get the feeling that so much time was spent on creating an entire ship's crew of half human, half fish characters that someone forgot to write an actually entertaining screenplay. The few times when the script was decent was when lines were basically copied and pasted from the first movie. As a result, Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, and Orlando Bloom left much to be desired, but not by their own faults. I have to echo the Boston Globe's comment that Johnny Depp "mailed it in," but he could not have done any better with the script he was given.
Bottom line- you will see this movie, you will be mildly entertained at times, you will be left with a feeling of emptiness at the finish, and then you will attempt to fill that emptiness by going to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End when it comes out next Summer, only to find you could never quite recapture that great feeling of the first movie of the series- and the POTC franchise will win. Sound like a familiar plot line? This is the Matrix trilogy all over again- they even found an excuse to toss in some bullet time technology.