“Screen comedy is at its best when it pitches its tent close to the poverty line. The minute the effects budget swells, it starts to crush the life out of comedy, which needs empty spaces to roam and some quality alone with the audiences in order to enlist its complicity in its subversions. It is, I think, a universal truth of movie-making that effects are never funny. They can sometimes wow you, but they can’t make you laugh, and [Johnny] Depp cannot stand up to the hubbub they create. No actor can. He can only serve them, which involves him in derring-do that any actor could do about as well as he can. He needs to be involved with us, not with the lunking machinery of the movie.” — Time critic Richard Schickel on…uh-oh, I’m going to get attacked again for running another anti-Pirates item. But I swear I’m running Schickel’s piece because it happens to be very well-written.