Spare Change

Pirates of the Caribbean 3: Rated Aaargh!

Posted by Bryan

The McAnally family was among those who waited in line for an hour to watch the expected blockbuster hit Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End.

Little of this outside-of-the-movie experience made it memorable (in a good way). The theater was packed, which is fine. Yet, from the lady who sat her 10-year old on her lap next to us, to the plurality of teens who behave like they've never been trusted alone in a room with the lights turned off, to the person who had to let their cell phone ring 6 times at the one moment where it was revealed if Keith Richards was in fact the Sparrow Patriarch or just a really old Rolling Stone to the guy in the row behind me who kept using my seat back as his own pull-himself-out-of-the-seat lever, by the time the film began, I was already grumpier than a bound-to-a-single-body Calypso.

Fast forward 2 hours and 48 minutes and $70 for tickets and concessions (give or take a couple doubloons). Pirates 3 is a case of not enough swash and too much buckle.

At one point, 60% of McAnallys were asleep in their seats. And one of them was not a child.

It was hard not to walk out feeling scally-wagged (thank me later for creating this verb form), in that the movie was both darker (visually, not thematically) and less engaging than its predecessors. This movie was built not upon sword-play and high-seas adventures, but upon double-crosses, betrayed love, and daddy issues. Moreover, this soupy plot was served with a thick broth of Asian, Pirate, and Caribbean accents, which made the dialogue barely discernable much of the time.

The only thing that I'll reveal that may be a little spoiler-ish is in the context of my disappointment of the inclusion of Jack's alter-egos emerging as a hallucinatory effect at times of his imprisonment (first in D. Jones's locker and later in the brig of the Flying Dutchman). This is one easy, perfect example where the editor could have exercised some cutting room discretion. Perhaps these scenes were left in to make Jack more sympathetic as a schizophrenic victim whose personality seems to splinter under cases of extreme duress. And seriously, I had ample time to come up with this theory and ponder its possibilities to their logical conclusions because the movie was so stinking long and meandering.

I know my under-whelmed response would not stop you from going if you had read it before you went, nor will it if you plan to. Some mistakes you have to make on your own...I understand that. Even so, here's a few things that suprised me about the movie that you should know before you head to the movie house, in full pirate regalia (as too many others have chosen to do):

• Pirates 3: Not so much about the seas & fortune-hunting as it is a treatise rallying against illicit music & movie downloading.


• Extended 17-minute debate between Barbosa and Calypso about whether it is pronounced Ca-RIB-ean or CAR-i-BE-an


• Surprise cameo of Hannah Montana singing It's A Small World After All on the deck of a passing-by Disney Cruise Liner


• The Pirate's Shipwreck Island and Lost's mystery island: The same place. (And it may be just me, but does Lost's Jacob look eerily similar to POTC3's Captain Sao Feng?)


• The corporately-driven decision to replace the "follow-your-heart's-desire" compass with an aboard-ship Onstar system.


• Will Turner's incessant pleas to engage Davey Jones in multilateral negotiations and threatened sanctions, aided by peace-keeping troops from the UN.


• Unexpected scurvy outbreak that brings the film to a sudden & abrupt conclusion.

By the time this mundane marathon was over, I may have been taken to the far reaches of the nether-world, but the only place I was at the end of was my nerves.

May 25, 2007 1:01 PM