POTC 3: WTF were we on when we wrote this?

By: daforce
Date: Sunday, May 27, 2007

We have officially seen the worst movie of the summer, and surprisingly it wasn't Shrek 3. No, I'm talking about Pirates of the Carribean 3: At World's End.

What a convoluted mess of a movie. Not that the second movie was tidy either, but the second movie is a gem of a masterpiece when compared to the third. There are so many plots in this movie begging for the audience's attention, yet a lot of them aren't really important. Just like a lot of the new characters aren't important (Chow Yun, I'm talking to you). There's a lot of extraneous, bloated crap that the writer's (for one reason or another) decided to shoehorn in, while leaving some important scenes out and explained with a sentence or two.

Explanations. When your characters need to explain and recap WTF they're doing at almost every step along the way, then maybe your story needs a couple hundred more rewrites. When the fight scenes last so long, and are so murky that you can't tell who is fighting whom and you no longer care, maybe it's time to bring in a competent editor.

In fact, POTC 2 and POTC 3 could have both been edited considerably and merged into one 2 hour movie that would have been watchable and enjoyable. Instead, we get Fellini-esque Johnny Depp, and a myriad of scenes stolen from a bunch of better films (most from Terry Giliam's work).

I literally turned to my friend midway through the movie to ask WTF was going on. Only because my brain was trying to save itself in a futile attempt to erase the previous 1.5 hours from memory.

I checked my watch so often during the movie that you'd have thought that I had OCD. This wasn't even Matrix trilogy painful, it was a whole new pain unto itself.


Rating: Watch it on network tv. The editing is bound to help.

Click here to read the staff review by Mania.