A Critical Voice In The Cinema Wilderness

Rating: 4/10 (18 May 2013)

This is a perfect movie if (A) you are a twelve year old boy, (B) you like to see stunt men ejected from explosions over and over and over again (C) you will watch anything with Johnny Depp, regardless.
For more discriminating adults, the two and a half hours of noise and chaos unrelieved by any semblance of careful plotting becomes tedious. Depp is certainly fun for the first half hour, sending up the pirate image by coating his eyes with kohl and sending up the Disney image by acting a little less than wholesome, but after a while, one longs for more than people screaming with swords in their hands backed up with a bombastic music score that underscores the emptiness of the enterprise.
One longs for the sense of heroic purpose and genuine derring-do exemplified by Errol Flynn/ Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, or Burt Lancaster in such grand adventures as The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood, Sinbad The Sailor or The Crimson Pirate, all recently released on vivid, family-oriented DVDs; Pirates From The Carribbean is cynical corporate entertainment, the humor ironic or tongue-in-cheek, and, though marketed as such, is really not for children unless they are so desensitized to blood and savagery from video games that nightmarish visions do not bother them.