Metacritic reviews

Finally, there's a big-budget popcorn movie that delivers what moviegoers hunger for: humor, action, thrills and charismatic characters. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is the summer blockbuster we've been waiting for.

A film that dares to be smart, reasonably complicated and scary while swashing its buckles.

Verbinski puts a Jackie Chan flourish of high energy and gymnastic action on the swashbuckling stunts and swordplay and keeps this lark sailing along.

Pirates offers something for everyone: Bloom and Depp for the ladies, big action and Knightley for the men, self-aware gags for the postmodern crowd, Depp and Rush for fans of top-rank scenery chewing.

Letting any other actor run wild like this could have been a disaster, but Depp's peculiar buccaneer is an instant classic of actorly charisma.

Convoluted but diverting.

Trimming half an hour from this bloated, 143-minute blockbuster would have highlighted the film's treasures, not the least of which is Johnny Depp's endearingly eccentric performance as Captain Jack Sparrow.

Director Gore Verbiniski delivers the best one can hope for: a cleverly nostalgic, high-tech copy of the real deal.

Depp swans through this swashbuckler with a scene-stealing gusto unseen since Marlon Brando in "Mutiny on the Bounty." He's comic dynamite, but this plodding, repetitive bore should walk the plank for timidly refusing to light his fuse.

The booty here is 100 percent fool's gold.