Review: Pirates of the Caribbean 2

It's not the worst movie I have ever seen. Pirates of the Caribbean 1 was far worse.

This one was just kind of.... dreary. For a popcorn movie, it was pretty slow moving. While the action scenes were predictably overdone, they lacked even the dubious virtue of the first film's "turned up to eleven" excess. Maybe the ponderous tone was due to the film makers trying to "go deeper" into the story - I suspect the limp plot line about Keira Knightly exploring her inner pirate was meant to be that. But while the writers/producers/directors/sausage grinders who were responsible for this may have thought they were making Godfather Part 2 or even The Empire Strikes Back, they were really just making Wayne's World 2. And I don't even want to start in on why those black people were standing waist deep in the water holding candles in the final scene as the guys poled their boats into the Pirates ride at Disneyland to go talk to Lisa Bonet's younger sister. (That is where they were, right?)

To test my perspective, I did interview one viewer, Katie R., age 12 from Glendora, California, who said: "I was bored. I was falling asleep". (And this was after she had slept 12 hours the night before!)

For another take: watch this review from Ask a Ninja. Here's a taste...

The structure of the movie, the best that I can tell is, they loaded about four or five different screenplays into a shotgun, and then just, and then just pulled the trigger, and then sent somebody around, like a P.A. around to just pick up random words and piece them together and then hand that to the actors. And then even that script was lost about half way through shooting and then the director just made it up every day.

Now that's good writing.