Highly overrated

Rating: 6/10 (16 September 2003)

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl has been regarded as the best film this summer in the US, and many IMDb users have praised the return of the pirate genre.
With this in mind I went to the cinema and watched this movie, and once again I disagree with the IMDb users and possibly also a lot of critics. The story had a lot of potential with ghost pirates and stuff like that, it is a pirate movie and you can accept things like this, but the movie fails to impress me for several reasons.
First of all the cast was not chosen wisely. Johnny Depp is without doubt a great actor, but he is simply the wrong choice for an old pirate. He does not look old, but according to the story he should have been captain on the same ship where Geoffrey Rush was chief officer. The rest of the cast was chosen more wisely, but I never liked Orlando Bloom's character either.
One thing that really annoyed me was that almost every character should be funny, it was very annoying and at some points unbearable to watch. First we have some stupid English soldiers, later Johnny Depp has to be funny, and we also have to watch some funny ghost pirates all the time. Suddenly all characters have to be funny, and the ghost pirates are just comic sidekicks in this movie, they are not scary at all. The idea to make the English soldiers stupid has also been seen so many times before, and I really dislike it.
If that was all of it, then I maybe would not be that grumpy, but that was not all of it. The whole idea of immortal pirates was actually not good even though I accept stuff like that in this pirate adventure genre. I can ask a simple question, why do people take a fight against these immortal pirates? There is absolutely no point in doing that because the outcome has already been decided. Am I the only one who is asking these simple questions? Hopefully I am not.
After having criticised the movie I also have to point out some of the good sides. The movie is well done in both sound and picture. The effects are good and the ships can fascinate most people.
Anyway, the movie does not deserve a good rating, because the plot is too thin and all scenes have to be fun, which is a disaster in a 143 minute movie. Beautiful scenes and a few laughs however make this an acceptable picture, which should not be treated as an memorable movie of year 2003. - Rating: 6/10.