Dear Pirates of the Carribean 3,Shrek 3, Godfather: Part III, Austin Powers 3: Goldmember, Friday After Next, Major League 3: Back to the Minors, Rambo 3, Jaws 3, Smoky and the Bandit 3, Beverly Hills Cop III, Bad News Bears Go to Japan, and others,
Stop. Just stop. Go away. We don’t want you. You are one movie too many in what could’ve been a great original film and on occasion, a decent sequel. But your presence in this world has only made our world dumber and worse. You represent money-grubbing capitalism at its very worst and you cause us nothing but pain and less money because we spend our hard earned dough having to sit through you. I hope you all die.
And as for you, Pirates of the Carribean 3: At World’s End, what the hell are you trying to do? You make absolutely no sense. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I’m a pretty decent storyteller and good at giving clear and concise plot descriptions of books or movies. But if you asked me to tell you the plot of this film in any sort of detail, I just wouldn’t know where to begin. The movie is a poor constructed mish-mash of deceits and double-crosses, so wildly thrown together that its just impossible to figure out what’s going on. There is some ok sword fighting action littered throughout, but as my friend Greg said, “If I want sword-fighting, I can just watch The Three Musketeers.”
The characters are so completely spent by the time this movie begins that there’s really nowhere for them to go, and so we see them spinning their wheels the time without covering any new ground. Orlando Bloom is still bland and totally irrelevant to the film’s main plot, Keira Knightly is still hot and likes to be treated like an equal (we get it, you can fight, so shut up), and Johnny Depp is so flamboyant and flouncy that I couldn’t bear a single moment he was on-screen. How many times do we need to see Johnny Depp grab a rope, shoot some unseen location on the rope, and then fly from one ship to the next while holding said rope? 4 times? 5 times? And what the hell is Chow-Yun Fat doing in this movie? He’s in about 8 of the 168 minutes, during which he talks in an indecipherable accent, has fingernails that belong on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, takes about 7 steam baths, and then he dies. Even worse, his minions are all mercenary soldiers for hire, and he himself sells out to the British. What kind of message does this send to Asian or Asian-American viewers? That white folks are true to each other while Asians are deceitful and money hungry? And it’s not like they’re trying to be historically accurate or anything here.
The worst part of the movie is how obviously its become a Disney concubine, being degraded and debased to bring in more and more moolah. You know you’re in trouble when a parrot and a monkey have more lines and screen time than Orlando Bloom and Geoffrey Rush combined (Rush is perhaps the only character I didn’t mind watching. He’s too good an actor to really ever dislike, although it really saddened me to watch him at this, the nadir of his career acting-wise.) There are about 5 scenes with Johnny Depp talking to other imaginary Johnny Depps, as if simply watching Johnny Depp go through his Captain Jack spiel for 20 minutes counts as comedy gold. Can you imagine if another movie tried to do this? Stuck its unique and lovable character in a remote location by himself and filmed him just doing caricatures of himself alone for twenty minutes at a time and tried to pass it off as good filmmaking? It’s laughable, and as a viewer, it made me feel defensive and violated, as if Disney assumes I’m really so stupid as to enjoy something as inane as that. And it can’t just be for the kids either because we’re talking a 3 hour movie here.
Speaking of which, the title of this movie is very appropriate because as I was watching it, I felt that so much time was passing it would most certainly be the end of the world by the time I emerged from the theater. I can’t recall finding a movie of this length so hard to watch since I watched the 4-plus hours of Exodus for a film class a few years ago. Sitting through the 168 minutes of Pirates was an extremely difficult endeavor. It’s one thing to be a 3 hour movie. I’ve seen plenty of those (The Lord of the Rings trilogy springs to mind) that have been fantastic, so length alone is not the issue. It’s also another thing to be a bad movie. I’ve seen my fair share of those as well (Men in Black II horribly springs to mind, ugh). But I can’t recall ever having seen a movie of such extreme length be so extremely bad. Usually, a bad movie is over in maybe 80-120 minutes, you groan and get back to your life. But here, you begin wanting to die around the 90 minute mark and have to slip farther into your death wish for another 70 minutes!
I could go on and on about how much I hated this movie. Even with movies I dislike, I rarely find myself so indignant that I feel like demanding my admission fee back, but that’s exactly how I feel about this mess of a film. Unless you really, really love pirates or this franchise (not just the first film; you’d have to really love #2 as well), or feel like wasting 3 hours of your life, you should under no circumstances see this film. It sucks. Pure and simple.
So Pirates 3 and all you other crappy third films in trilogies, go to hell.
Don’t write back,
Media Maven
Film: D-
Franchise as a whole: D+
P.S. Can you think of any other terrible #3 in a trilogy movies I forgot? Disagree with my ideas? Leave some comments and let me know!
how about the third matrix? that one kind of made me want to die.
you know i don’t see movies but i just saw this one and i totally agree with you. i thought that maybe the reason i didn’t understand what was going on was because i hadn’t seen the second one (which looked awful), but the person i went with HAD seen the second one and still had no idea what was going on. even the fighting was confusing and the other parts were boring or unnecessary. and yeah…what was the deal with that stupid monkey and that stupid bird? i really did not think it was relevant to the plot in any way to show the monkey jumping on the parachute with jack and whats her face sparrow at the end.
I thought about adding Matrix Revolutions, but I decided that I only wanted to include movies that absolutely suck, and I found that film to have at least a few redeeming qualities (high quality action sequences chief among them).
Thanks for your comment!
agree about the 3rd matrix. it’s sort of in that godfather category that it couldn’t possibly live up to the first 2, but also, the 3rd matrix was absolutely necessary. the third godfather was made 14 years after the first two, arguably two of the greatest movies ever, so in this case i think we have to give the nod to matrix because at least there was a reason it was made. do we really need to see andy garcia hooking up with his cousin, played by the nepotismically casted sophia coppola?…thats just weird.
As for other ridiculous third movies, what immediately came to mind was The Mighty Ducks 3.
All the mighty ducks, and their new national team members from the timeless classic D2 go to one fancy private high school (kenan thompson as the knucklepuck guy does not make it…i guess he can’t afford the school. he did use newspapers as shin guards in d2 so i can’t exactly be surprised). as if that isn’t shady enough, the team already has a great varsity team. anyone who has ever played a sport knows that all players go to tryouts, and the best players make the varsity team. this idea is never even considered. immediately, the entire ducks team is made the JV team. Then, after much bitching/pranks, one game is played to determine who will be the varsity team. who the fuck is coaching these teams? who is the athletic director? is this really how people think the teams are selected? the mighty duck man himself emilio estevez makes only a token appearance. and, finally, how do you go from beating the hawks, to beating iceland, to…making the varsity hockey team. still, i would see d4 the first day it came out.
I swear to you, as Rachel reminded me, I almost included D3 in my list of terrible 3′s. But I just love those Ducks and couldn’t bring myself to do it. You make an excellent point though– who the hell were the administrators at that school?
Thanks for the comments, Greg.