Hey, I tried

Rating: Null/10 (7 December 2003)

I went in with high hopes. I admitted that Keira was hot. I even watched it a second time when it came out on DVD.
But it's simple - I just hate Pirates of the Caribbean. I tried not to. But I do. Everybody else likes it - why can't I? I don't know, but I just... I don't.
To be frank, this movie is boring. Strange, I know, because there are constant fight scenes, but something about them makes them less than entertaining. Take the fight scene in the blacksmith's shop. There was all kinds of peril and stuff, fighting on rafters, ducking under things, fighting on a cart, but it just seemed so cliched. It felt as though I'd seen it before, and I knew what'd happen next. The fact that it was an overly long fight scene didn't help matters much. This was the case with most fight scenes in the movie - they're not really outstanding in any one way. Nothing really surprised me. And again, so incredibly LONG. A fight scene should keep itself fairly short. Take the subway fight scene in the original Matrix - how long was that? 3 minutes? 4? And it kept away from cliches pretty well too. And then, after three or four minutes, the fight scene was over and we were on to a chase scene. That's the beauty of it - in a movie theater, people want to see lots of different locations and variety. Even if a fight scene isn't cliched, it doesn't do well if it's really, really long, and Pirates seemed to miss that.
Also, I maintain that this movie is roughly 37 hours long. It was like they had 120 minutes worth of plot, but enough film for 143 minutes, so they just said 'what the heck, do an more with the zombies and an escape scene too'. There were bits all through the movie that could have been cut out to make the movie less of an ordeal to go through. I'm not knocking long movies - Pulp Fiction, Chinatown, those movies were justified in being long because they would have sucked were they not long. Polanski didn't say 'what the hell, throw in some action scenes here' and Quentin didn't give Jules a love interest because they didn't need that, just as Pirates didn't need that escape scene on the end.
Maybe I just dislike this movie normally, and then hate it because everybody else likes it and I feel cool when I go against the flow. Or maybe I'm just different. I don't know, I just wish that I'd never wasted my time on this movie, that they wouldn't make a sequel, and that they'd show the marching band half time show on televised college football games rather than cutting away to a bunch of people talking.