As I have promised to do some sort of regular Friday movie review here goes. Incidentally, I don't know if this will be entirely regular -- sometimes I don't see movies. So we will see how it goes.

Pirates of the Caribbean passed swimmingly the low expectations test: everyone thought with good reason that a movie inspired by a Disney ride would suck; therefore, when it did not suck, people were substantially impressed. Similarly, Johnny Depp exposes one to the awesome spectacle of what would happen if someone so addled by decades of drug use that reality often eludes them were to engage in piracy. Kiera Knightley is about as likely to be good at sword play as Kate Moss is to fight crime (or move around quickly without having a stroke from low blood sugar), but we can overlook such trivialities. The movie was good, not in spite of being rather simple-minded, but largely because it was rather simple-minded.

Pirates of the Caribbean 2, on the other hand, is what happens when writing is done by committee. OK, I don't know that for certain, but if you sit through it you be struck with the image of Disney hacks sitting in a room saying "You know what'd be cool, if they had a sword fight on a water wheel." There were interesting tableaus but so disconected from one another that they become a gag reel.

Not to mention that (and this is a bit of a spoiler), but it also repeats the stupidity of Matrix 2: writing a movie to advertise for its sequel. You, I, and every other sane person hate it when they do that.

Johnny Depp is his same old crazy, but in this film they try and inflict psychology on a character that cannot tolerate it. I liked Jack Sparrow more when he had a pleasantly anonymous interior life, not when he has issues of ethics. Besides that, we want him to act like a jackass. No one would have liked Byron if he hadn't been a Byronic hero.

True, the special effects are good, but like many movies nowadays they are special effects without good reason and more importantly without the emotional tension to back them up. I will give you an example. In the movie Jurassic Park, one of the first to use CGI, there was the scene where they are sitting in the car watching the water in their drinks shake at the approaching Tyrannosaur, still unseen. When the beast finally appears, you are so on the edge of your seat that it actually means something. In this film, you are like "Oh, the Kraken came back...well I guess that's unfortunate."

On the whole, like most summer blockbusters, I would see this movie drunk or on a date. It doesn't say anything complicated, and you could make out for half an hour in the middle and not miss anything.