Fun to watch, but too long and lacks purpose

Rating: 6/10 (20 October 2003)

Pirates certainly was interesting. In fact, some of the droll, dark humor was very unDisney-like (and enjoyably so). But the movie ran about two hours, and would have been better at 90 minutes. Much of it involved sword fights and plot twists that didn't add much. The plot was like a thread that would be dropped for 10 minutes, then picked up again. Johnny Depp was superb. What a strange character he created. It begged the question, though, of how this goof could have lived more than 20 minutes as a pirate. Finally, and a minor spoiler. if you end up cursed for stealing Cortez's gold, didn't the governor's daughter steal the gold from the unconscious boy? Just wondering. A good movie, which is a step in the right direction for Disney, but undisciplined and meandering. We gave it a 6.