An average movie

I’m pretty sure I already saw this movie but it was at least 20 years ago so I was really eager to check it out again. Even though it had a rather lame reputation, I always thought  it was actually a decent pirate movie, at least, as far as I could remember but after re-watching the damned thing, I have to agree, it wasn’t really good after all. I mean, it was visually pretty neat with some nice costumes and some great sets (especially the Neptune looked pretty awesome. It was a full scale ship that did cost almost $10 million). Walter Matthau was also a great choice to play the lead part, even if his English accent was not convincing and even rather cringe-inducing. So, it seems that Polanski had already the most important ingredients at his disposal but he apparently forgot to bring also a decent story. Indeed, even though the introduction was promising, it took the characters just way too long to take over this ship. Indeed, after 1 hour, they finally got this ship but they lost it again and this back-and-forth was just really tedious. They also tried to add a really bombastic soundtrack to make us believe that it was all really exciting but it was anything but subtle and it was also rather annoying. Eventually, this movie would be the only attempt from Polanski to direct a blockbuster so far and the end-result was certainly quite underwhelming. To conclude, even though it was a big pet project for this director (he worked on it for maybe 16 years), it turned out to be his weakest movie but even a weak movie from the Polish master is still work a look in my book.