From what I could make out early on, Barbosa and some annoying skank go to Chinatown to ask this chinese fella for a ship, but he gets pissed off because he's had to put up with being visited by this pansy thief recently. At some point, the Brits arrive and shoot up the place and in the chaos, the thief steals the ship keys, and the crew push off to the end of the world, which is really cold. Yeah, I didn't really see the point, either.

Then we have Jumping Jack Sparrow commanding a crew of Sparrows set against a white screen, which is pretty conspicuous cost-cutting for a movie they spent a fortune on. Again, what's the point? I thought I saw some crabs, but then I passed out.

When I came to, it was already the intermission and my friend sitting next to me was saying, "Man, it's all about Calypso now, she's so important, and Chow Yun Fat tried to rape her, but he got the wrong woman, so he was killed, and now her! She's the pirate lord now. They killed him, man! I can't understand any of it."

Being a bit groggy, it took me a while to figure he wasn't yanking my chain, and the 'scriptwriter' actually had gone batshit. I sat through some more arbitratry bullshit, including lots of unneccessary footage of some whiny whelp as undecided about his allegiance as his sexuality.

Finally, it wrapped up with a half an hour maritime battle scene around a whirlpool which was probably the high point of the movie, in spite of the one wedding and watery funeral that occurs in between. I kid you not.

Is it really this hard to write a story for an adventure movie? Pirates 3 doesn't have a story, it just has random events connected together by improbable explanations. It's evident they spent everything they had to make everything look as pretty as possible (or ugly, as some situations called for), but how much does it cost to hire a half-decent screenwriter, anyway? It's not like they're in great demand in Hollywood right now, so I ought to think they come damn cheap. Geoffrey Rush is a fine actor, and Johnny Depp clowning around as Sparrow can be highly entertaining, but without the semblance of a script to back it up, they're pretty much wasted. The less said about the rest of the cast, the better. Except maybe Stellan Skarsgård, he's done some good roles before, but he was relegated to furniture (barnacle encrusted furniture, at that) in this movie, so nevermind. What's the point of everything looking so great when you don't give a damn about anyone in the movie, and two of the primary characters are annoying shitpiles you hope drop dead at the earliest opportunity? Oh yeah, that was another brief high point in the movie – if only it had happened way earlier, and been more permanent.

Anyway, this is the lowest I've seen pirates stoop. And that includes the famous Jolly Rogering on the HMS Booty. Speaking of which, you should probably check out the porno by the same name – Pirates, that is. It's definitely money better spent, and I imagine the replay value is also leaps and bounds ahead.

Bah, I miss the good old days of the Monkey Island games – Guybrush and LeChuck, what a combo! Actually, the more I think about it, Pirates is just a terribly substandard ripoff of Monkey Island. Now if they'd gotten Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer or Dave Grossman to do the script, it could've worked. Probably would have, actually. Instead, I suspect they got a monkey, which might explain all the monkey comic relief scenes.

Bottom line - skip this one if you like movies which bother to entertain you. Watch it if you get off on visual effects, makeup, set design, costume design and just happen to be an insomniac.

Srikanth Panaman

Same story, different city here. We too, tanked up beers, the smokers lit up a joint or two and we sailed on our small passenger cars to the mall multiplex to watch this steaming pile of bullshit. You'd think Chacko wouldn't have given a fair review having slept through two-thirds of the film but face it, he didn't miss anything at all. If you're into westerns, there's "Man with a harmonica" soundtrack from Once Upon A Time In The West used when these assclowns face each other on the beach front that brought a smile onto my face, but that's it. We all knew the final battle scene was going to be taking up all the millions of dollars but no, they had to fuck it up with the marriage angle. I'm going to get beaten up by all the women who read this, but Jack Sparrow crossed the line and became the most annoying character on the screen with this installment. Fuck this shit, doesn't even deserve a pirated copy.

Because we like to watch millions of dollars getting blown up,