What A Waste of a Good Novel

Rating: 1/10 (4 June 2011)

I enjoyed Tim Powers' novel "On Stranger Tides," and was hoping that Disney Studios would find a way to turn it into an decent "Pirates of the Caribbean" film. I was horrendously disappointed. They scarcely used anything at all from the novel. The film had no virtually no plot (and for those of you who may confuse plot with action, they are NOT the same thing), no rooting interest, and the least chemistry between the two leads that I have ever seen in a film in my entire life. It wasn't just that Depp's character and Lopez's characters did not seem to care about each other, they barely seemed to have met. They managed to make Blackbeard the pirate dull and nonthreatening. They made the life of a pirate slightly less thrilling than the life of a certified public accountant.