The governor's daughter is kidnapped and an inept pirate (Johnny Depp) and a young blacksmith in love with her join forces to rescue her from undead pirates (headed by Geoffrey Rush).

All right, I wish Erroll Flynn had access to these effects. Flynn played a man forced into piracy in "Captain Blood" and a privateer (someone licensed to commit acts akin to piracy in wartime by the Queen, in the anti-Hitler parable "The Sea Hawk"). But special effects alone can't save a sinking ship of a movie.

The story of "Pirates of the Caribbean" isn't difficult to follow. Admittedly, this movie has an awful lot of story but I followed it fine after I got bored with the whole shebang and started surfing on my phone, listening to the movie with only one ear.

The movie is very long. I don't mind long movies, but this one bored the socks off me. I'm still looking for one of them. And when I was fed up and checked the time on the dvd to see if it was nearly over and realized I had more than forty minutes to go, I switched off my dvd player and haven't gone back to it yet.

Some of the imagery is gruesome but I remember what it was like being twelve. I ate that stuff up . . . Though it might give younger children the willies.

Anyhow,the subtitle "the curse of the Black Pearl" is a misnomer: it's not "The Black Pearl" that's cursed, but the gold, allegedly stolen from the Aztecs by Cortes (ask the Toltecs some time what they thought of the Azetcs; they basically did to the Toltecs what Cortez did to them. What goes around . . . ) The undead pirates may be brought back to life under certain conditions . . . But I won't give it away. It's the crux of the movie and I'd hate to spoil it.

I've enjoyed Depp's performances in other movies but here he's just plain weird, to say the least. Keira Knightley is okay, though I've had a mental block to her since "Doctor Zhivago." Rush comes off as the typical pirate, though he doesn't play up a silly Long-John-Silver Bristol accent, thank goodness. He's the best thing in the movie, and that's not high praise.

"Pirates of the Caribbean" has lots of good, if occasionally misplaced, humor. I never watch movies about gangsters, though I give leeway to watching flicks about pirates. After this I'll probably rethink that policy. I found the whole thing a big, bloated bore. Oh, it's better than lots of live-action Disney movies, especially those that nearly sank the company in the 1970s and 1980s. I wouldn't trade this for any of Kurt Russell's Disney "comedies." But someone needed to take a hatched into the editing suite. More is not always better.