Rollicking great fun. It works b.c of tongue-in-cheek Depp.

Rating: 10/10 (14 July 2004)

"But where's the rum gone!"
All Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, who's Erroll Flynn meets Keith Richards) wants is to drink rum, swagger and regain control of the beloved ship he was cast from, The Black Pearl. Its convenient that he stumbles across Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), who both may be exploited to get the Pearl back, and has a mission of his own, rescuing the princess, which Depp can go along with...
Rousing, hearty, swashbuckling good entertainment. If Hollywood blockbusters were always this much fun (and always had Johnny Depp to bolster them and make them tongue-in-cheek), then i'd say more power to them. Its travesties like Pearl Harbour that insult the public's sense of taste.
If you can overlook the lack of effort and skills from Orlando Bloom (doing his best Matthew Broderick impersonation - which is easy, just make your face as blank as possible)
8/10. Its a masterpiece of the order of Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It lost big points from me because i found Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann to be corny and cliche, and am still amazed that people consider what Orlando Bloom does "acting." Plus, and maybe this is my fault, but i saw it three times within the space of a month, and by the third time its appeal was waning. It seems that unlike something like Mr Bean, or something as visually beautiful as Lawrence of Arabia, it doesn't have unlimited replayability. That probably means that its not to deep. Which it isn't - its very surface entertainment - which means you can only reap so much value from it.
"And really bad eggs... Drink up me 'earties, yo ho!"