Skulls and bones

Rating: 1/10 (17 December 2006)

Naturally, computer graphics had to get in there --- pirates alone could never be enough for the modern child. She has to have pirates who are ghouls as well, so that the film is a messy hybrid of horror and adventure.
The combination of men who can't be killed fighting endlessly with characters made of wood while a symphony orchestra goes crazy is utterly tedious.
It's so sad that worldwide youngsters subject to the American global market have only this junk-food to consume on DVD.
Throughout the whole deadening two and a half hours, there are about five seconds of shots of the Caribbean. The picture might as well have been shot in Disneyland.
Johnny Depp is even more pathetic here than in his next role, The Libertine, in which he played a sex-crazed poet who never touches a woman throughout the whole film.
His British accent, predictably, is a mess (as in The Libertine) and his role in this film is to spend long periods in a cell while everyone else gets on with it. The idea that he is some kind of commander of men is ridiculous. He simply camps up the whole picture and makes a mockery of it.
Naturally, the plot is the most ludicrous imaginable, it's not even worth discussing. Suffice it to say that it is full of holes you could navigate a ship through.
As for black people who populate the Caribbean, just two appear in this picture: one a glimpsed female pirate captain (!), the other a glimpsed huge stereotyped brute with a studded face and massive muscles. So, take your pick: cheesy stereotype or politically correct cut-out. As for the other millions who inhabit the Caribbean, they don't exist.
If there was a scrap of history that validated this film as a nostalgic romp, it might be excusable. But since it is a farrago of fantasy and faux-fairytale, it is to be roundly condemned. Everyone who raves about this film is doomed.