Movie Review: Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End

We finished up our May Movie Spectacular Triple Crown tonight by seeing the 8 PM showing of the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. The theater was about 80% full for the first showing, but I heard from someone in the lobby afterwards that the 8:05 PM showing was only about 1/3 full. (Our local theater had five (!) showings starting between 8 and 8:30, and another five starting between 11:30 PM and midnight.)

If you're thinking of seeing PotC3, one thing is sure -- don't even think about going unless you saw the 2nd one. The story picks right up where that one left off, and they don't even try filling in the backstory for those who didn't see "Dead Man's Chest". I don't want to give away too much, but parts of the movie I enjoyed were the "ultimate trim party" and really good CGI. I also laughed at the monkey a few times. Keith Richards wasn't as good as I had hoped, but he was still a highlight.

I can't really say it was a disappointment, because I honestly didn't expect too much out of it. The Y-chromosome-lacking members of my household are really big Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom fans (one for each) so they seemed to like it. I normally like longer movies that use the time to develop the characters (or blow extra stuff up) but the three Pirates movies have always made me think, "This thing is still going on? Why?"

I don't mind suspending disbelief, but only if it serves a purpose. The script of this movie had 17th or 18th century people using sail travelling between the Caribbean and Singapore in essentially no time flat. I could see them doing it if there was a purpose, but in this case it only seemed to be so they could have Chow Yun-Fat as a pirate, and since he's Asian, they had to have him live in Asia. If you're featuring Davy Jones' Locker as an actual place, why not say Asian pirates set up a base in the Caribbean? It was distracting to all the people in the audience who have actually sailed across the Pacific a few times.

When we were driving home, my youngest son said, "Well, the three "3" movies in May were sure a disappointment. If The Simpsons Movie and Transformers end up sucking, I'm going to give up on summer 'blockbusters' forever." (Re: the "Three 3s", we both ended up agreeing that Spiderman 3 was the best of a mediocre lot, and Shrek 3 was the worst.) I've been through enough bad "summer smash movies" (read "Godzilla") to know what he was talking about, but this movie still had enough going for it for me to keep some faith in Hollywood. Overall, I give it three unnecessary plot twists out of five.