I seem to be one of the few people that actually enjoyed Pirates 2 a little better than the first movie, I just couldn’t get over how cool the Davey Jones character was in the film. Seeing how both movies developed gave me high hopes for the third installment and I can honestly say that the movie did not disappoint. The film was what I expected it to be, action packed, funny, a huge spectacle, all that jazz. Not perfect by any means, but the things I didn’t like don’t really detract too much from the movies overall quality.
The movie was a bit on the long side, and a couple of times I was very aware of how long I had been sitting in the theatre. If a movie can keep me interested for three hours then fine, bring it on, but if I start to feel like I’m on a long flight, then it’s time to cut to the chase. Because of the films length, I felt like I could have done without Keith Richards almost entirely, he just didn’t need to be there, the movie would have survived without him. Another minor issue is the diminished role of the other pirates throughout the movie; they just weren’t involved in the action as much as it seemed they should have been, but enough of what I didn’t like.
The battle scenes are awesome, in scale, and in just pure chaos. The battles are pitched and loud and completely in your face. The special effects in the final sequence are what you have come to expect from ILM and everything runs together so seamlessly. The dynamics between characters is even better in the third movie. I really appreciated the exchanges between Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush’s Barbosa as they went back and forth over the fate of the crew and the Black Pearl. The various relationships between characters that had developed over the course of the previous films was also explained pretty well.
Ultimately I felt that despite the attention paid to special effects and such, that they really did craft a well developed story. They never took the easy way out with the audience, they go with story lines that the audience might not expect and really just tell a good tale. I felt that the events surrounding the end of the film were particularly bold. I don’t want to give a single thing away because you should honestly go check this film out. Whether not it’s the best of the series is truly irrelevant, what’s most important is that it really completes trilogy.
