Pirates of the Caribbean

Yeah I must be getting bored. I know it's a kids movie but I'd heard enough good things about it to give it a chance. Naturally as a Disney movie it's incredibly stupid. Every character is a tired cliché, and you can expect a whole lot of treacly true love bullshit (especially at the end). But hey, even Disney can't fuck up a movie about zombie pirates, and there's plenty of decent, not quite gory enough action.

Basically the movie is all about Johnny Depp, who hams it entertainingly up as a crazy pirate captain, who makes a very cool, charming anti-hero. Even though the film is fluff I couldn't help but feel that there was a better movie hidden somewhere inside. The villains, a crew of pirate zombies, have some cool lines about suffering from their curse, never able to enjoy the fruits of the treasure that incurred the curse by stealing. A real movie could have extended this into some sort of metaphor. A real movie could have also played up Johnny Depp as 'the worst pirate in the world'. As it is it has trouble deciding whether he's a brilliant pirate who's secretly a sham, or if he's a brilliant pirate who outwardly appears to be incompetent. Either option could have been cool, had the writers picked one and stuck with it.