Tonight, I saw the last (please, please, let it be the last) Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the nearly three hour long At World's End. It made me truly glad this is a three-day weekend, because if I had wasted that much of a regular weekend on it, I'd be livid.
Johnny Depp's fun-loving performance was the main thing keeping the second movie from being a total loss, but it's just not enough here. He's not on screen for what feel like large chunks of the movie, and he's simply not as amusing when he is.
The action scenes are completely ill-conceived. "More" is suppose to be "better." More people fighting, and manic intercutting between them -- but it just keeps you from tracking any one piece of the action enough to fully comprehend it, or even to care. More CG tricks to deliver impossible settings for the battle -- but they look exactly that: "impossible." You simply know that nothing you're seeing is real, and it removes all the sense of adventure. The fun of that first Jack/Will sword fight in the first movie (or even the "giant wheel" sequence of part two) has been left 20,000 leagues behind.
The acting takes on a soap opera quality this time around. You get the feeling that even the actors don't really know what they're saying or what's going on, but they're compensating by doing lots of very intense emoting and shouting about things.
If only anything that was happening had the fun escapism of a soap opera, that might be something to get swept up in. But instead, the story staggers along as if the movie was being filmed in order and completely invented on the set as they went along. All sorts of uninteresting new concepts and characters that made no appearance (nor even received a mention) in the first two installments start popping up all over the place. There's a complete lack of unity in the plot -- a dozen different characters each want a dozen different things. And you don't care much if any of them gets any of it. Like Jack's compass, the script doesn't seem to know what it wants, and just keeps spinning around in circles trying to figure it out.
I give the movie a D-. Originally, I thought I was going to give it an F, but I looked back on my blog and saw that it took a movie as unspeakably awful as The Hills Have Eyes to get an F last time I gave one out. This Pirates was mind-numbingly boring, often times exceedingly dumb, but it wasn't quite that bad.
Not quite.
10 comments:
I wonder. At what point will moviegoers give up? I could tell from the previews of the last two Pirates movies, Spidey 3, and Shrek 3 that they would be stinkers. Am I too cynical? Am I too far removed from moviegoing altogether? Are teenagers still this bored and this desperate to get out of the house?
I agree wholeheartedly. I thought the first 30 or 40 minutes were very good, but the rest was pure caca.
I read on IMdB that they started shooting before the script was finished, and it must be the case because it certainly feels like it.
In any case, this is a good tutorial about what NOT to do when writing as screenplay.
What a load of crap.
FKL
Or does anything with a 3 just suck automatically?
Geoffrey Rush kept me in my seat. He was terrific.
If you saw the behind-the-scenes stuff for the second movie on the DVD, the writers wrote the script *after* the special effects sequences were designed.
This time, it really showed. Maybe making two movies at once is a bad idea.
" the writers wrote the script *after* the special effects sequences were designed. "
What?!? What the hell is that?
So someone just came up with the big special effects sequences, and the writers took that home and built a screenplay around that?
Way to go.
What a strange way to write a movie. To be honest, something like that has worked before: in the early fifties, producer Arthur Freed went to Adolph Green and Betty Comden and told them something like this: "MGM owns this here catalog of songs, and we'd like you to write a movie around them."
Thus was created Singin in the Rain, which I rank as one of the best musicals of all time.
FKL
It felt like I was watching some episodes of a TV show on the big screen. I have a feeling this movie will be like (any) LoTR film, where they left so much stuff on the cutting room floor it doesn't make any sense. this movie could've had about four more alternate endings depending on who [obvious spoiler blocked]
the only thing that really bothers me about the movie is that they take the whole "Davy Jones" folklore and trash it. a more extreme example would be like taking Santa and replacing him with some guy named Bob. no sweety, Santa doesn't deliver presents, it's Bob now... (WTF?)
I can't wait for Kingdom Hearts 3 where Sora, Donald, and Goofy battle Calypso and tie up that massively loose thread (I can imagine things that will make the movie better right?)
the mole
So imagine my horror at having to sit through it 3 times and check 21 prints of this flick this weekend for work. Oy. Personally, I think Geoffrey Rush was the best part of the flick and that's what made me enjoy it a bit more than the second one. Because really, it shows that they didn't work on writing the sequels at all.
Don't get me wrong, the first one isn't a masterpiece - but it's sure written better than these!
I almost feel bad for poor Gore Verbinski. He just needs to work with a good script editor and film editor for a change. If you watch POTC, the script sucked and turned into a 3 hour nightmare. Bad script editor. But if you watch The Mexican, that was a great story that got filmed and edited to hell. Bad film editor. The deleted scenes (about 30 minutes of them!) made that movie light years better than the dreck version that got dumped into theatres.
And I'm rambling, so I'll be going back to my next print of POTC.
God help me.r
I felt the same way about The Mexican. It felt so choppy, but I liked the story they were telling, so it's a slight winner.
I haven't seen this yet and from what I'm hearing all over the place, I don't think I want to. The third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs of your post sound like a review of a Star Wars prequel honestly. More action, worse acting, more soap opera, and characters and concepts not introduced previously? Wow. I guess I'll catch up with Spiderman 3 instead.
I read everyone's reviews and thought I was going to see a bad movie.
Well, I guess my expectations were sooo low that I enjoyed it. I liked the big CGI sequences. Not sure where the "random" characters comment came from. Weren't all those characters in #2 as well?
Characters not in #2: Chow Yun-Fat's character (who might as well not have been in THIS movie, for all the purpose he served in the plot), six random pirate lords we'd never seen before (but we got the "reaction shots" of each and every one of them at the beginning and end the ridiculous battle at the close of the film), and of course Keith Richards' cameo. Then there was the sudden retconning of Tia Dalma into "Calypso," which anti-climatically concluded with her using her much-talked about powers to turn into a pile of crabs and then summon one whirlpool with left all but two ships completely alone and failed to actually kill anyone.
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