[Alcoremortis]

I do remember that one of the biggest laughs I had in the first movie was Will with that damn wall sconce right at the beginning. Seriously, I started choking, I was laughing so hard. It's because I wasn't expecting it. They advertised the movie as hardcore action with a bit of drama and then pulled that shit out. The surprise made it glorious.

A lot of the humor in the next two movies tried too hard, the straight characters became straighter and the silly characters became sillier, but there were still always elements that I enjoyed. I liked Elizabeth and Barbossa, I liked Norrington, I liked Beckett, I liked Davy Jones... I liked the weird fish people because nobody ever uses weird fish people in movies.

And in Stranger Tides, they got rid of most of the characters I liked, failed to replace them with characters I could learn to like, refused to tell me anything about those characters, and trivialized the plot. I mean, we go from AWE, where there is a very real threat that every character that we've grown to like will end up swinging from a yardarm, to Stranger Tides, where the biggest threat is that someone else will become immortal first (or, I suppose, that minor characters with little screen time will die, but we barely even know who they are let alone feel any attachment to them). The drama was gone, the humor was gone, the characters were gone... it was a very empty movie and it made the little irritating things that I didn't mind so much in the previous movies really stand out.