So this summer is apparently the Summer of Sequels, we've already had Spider-man 3, 28 Weeks later, & Shrek 3 and this weekend has brought us Pirates 3. Coming up this summer we have Die Hard 4, Harry Potter 5, Ocean's 13 (AKA Better be more entertaining than Ocean's 12), Fantastic Four 2, Evan Almighty (the sequel to Bruce Almighty), The third Bourne Movie, Daddy Day Care, and Mr Bean's Holiday. I'm excited about most of these, but have to say after the way the summer's started off I'm a little worried.
Sure I loved Spider-Man 3 and had only minimal complaints, but in the last week I've seen two movies Shrek 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and I was deeply disappointed by both.

Shrek 3 was decent, but there were parts of the plot that went no where and quite frankly it wasn't that funny. The film focuses on Shrek going on a road trip to find Artie, the heir in line foe the Throne of Far, Far Away, also Prince Charming tries to take over the kingdom while Shrek's away. I've heard at least one reviewer said no one over 11 should see this film, and I guess it's true because we went with a friend of ours and his two kids and the kids loved it. I'm by no means saying Shrek 2 was the worst movie ever, it just doesn't live up to the standard set by the previous two films.
Bottom Line: Unless you have kids, wait and rent this flick because honestly it's just not worth the money you'll spend on the theater.

Pirates on the other hand was an over long mess of a film. There's honestly no way to summarize the plot in any way, because honestly I still don't know exactly what happened. Seriously the main problem with this movie was that it seems like they filmed way to much and then just decided not to edit anything out. The film was truthfully at least 45 minutes to long, and at 2hours and 45minutes that means that almost a third of your movie should have been cut. I was disappointed with Pirates 2, but there were some great action sequences that made up for the long run time, and lack of an ending, so I held out hope that Parts 2 & 3 were really just one long movie (as it turns out they'd make one REALLY long movie at well over 5 hours) but as it turns out they seem to be part of one long movie that still isn't over.
The movie just kept going and there was a lot in the middle of the film that didn't further the story at all, and in fact just made the film drag. One things that should have been cut was several scenes featuring Jack going crazy and talking to multiple versions of himself, these scenes just didn't work, and quite frankly were maddeningly pointless. And sadly there was not any of the great action scenes that saved the last film until the last 30 minutes.
Speaking of the last 30 minutes, the end of the movie was a horrible mess. A love story with a disappointing, and not to happy ending, a pirate once again without a ship, and overall just a waste of space.
Don't get me wrong as much as I'm complaining there was some good stuff in the movie, there were some very humorous scenes, and the action towards the end had several good
fight scenes and some fantastic ship to ship battles. But after a phenomenal first movie we deserved more out of parts 2 & 3 then just a quick way to cash in on the first one, and that seems to be what we got here.
Bottom Line: Rent it, that way you can fast forward through as much of it as you want to.

Labels: pirates 3, reviews, shrek 3