27th May 2007, 7:40 PM
Great Rumbler Wrote:Seriously. Most of the negative reviews said that it was confusing and hard to follow.
And it was - overly convoluted and hard to follow. You've really got to be kidding me when you say it has "too much intelligence for the average critic". It's a dumb, fun movie, like the others, and it's hard to follow because it's badly made, not because it's complicated. It has way too many plotlines pulling in all kinds of directions, leaving none of them to be resolved in a satisfactory manner. I don't even really know where to start, so I'll go over it quickly from the beginning.
Sao Feng kinda sucked. His delivery was too dramatic for a serious movie, and not dramatic enough for an over-the-top bombastic movie. The Singapore episode as a whole was cool, but inconclusive, like basically all the other plotlines of the movie (leaving us with a bunch of Chinamen hanging around for the rest of the film for no good reason). It felt a bit like an exercise in atmosphere and decor, which the ensuing voyage to save Jack Sparrow could have used lots more of. The trip seemed kind of trivial and un-epic, could have used lots more meat. Davy Jones' Locker is NOT a white rocky desert. Whathafuck.
The "Calypso" plotline is the movie's big joke. An unfortunately necessary escalation from the first movie's skeleton pirates and the second movie's sea horrors, it culminates in the groan-worthy ritual scene and doesn't really ever conclude or lead to anything interesting. It is made particularly uninteresting by the fact that Davy Jones' own presence throughout the movie is generally superfluous, as he basically spends his screentime ruining his own character with a pale imitation of the Darth Vader/Emperor relationship, making his appearance in the final battle about as impressive and frightening as a cute baby puppy. The boss of the East India Company is, by the way, nowhere near as interesting or menacing as the Emperor, and I am unimpressed by the fact that his sole character development seems to be "oh he's drinking tea all the time, what a jerk".
I don't really care about the romantic subplot between Prettyboy and Princess Keira Knightley, but even if I did, there wouldn't be much to say about it. The ambiguity created at the end of POTC2 is pretty much left unexplored - yes, I know they explain it away afterwards by saying something like "well I could just TELL you, duh" and no, I don't think that makes it alright.
I liked the other movies because they were straightforward steal-the-boat get-the-chick kill-the-floozy flicks. This one just tries too hard, all the time. I dug the coo-coo Jack Sparrow scenes, the crazy stuff like the wedding scene and the cool Brethren of the Coast characters (though I wish they would have done something... anything), but it just doesn't add up to a positive for me.