Waste of time

Disturbing yet enthralling

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

(Did you like that clever gag in the title?)I read the book yonks ago and I loved it and this isn't the book. Nothing close to it. But I don't care about that - I just want to see a ripping adventure about piracy... but this isn't that either!My God, how to deaden a story over three torturous hours! This is about as mindless and ridiculous as TV can get.The usual TV monkeys are wheeled out once again to perform in this ludicrous farce as proper actors have agents who tell them to avoid this bilge! The Trevor Eve academy of acting is in full swing... lots of angry shouting, pointless posturing, etc. The story seems to be buried amongst the props because for the life of me I couldn't make one out, but here goes... A young impressionable and slightly retarded man is seduced into the world of piracy on the high seas by a psychotic, drug taking, alcoholic black pirate and mum seems OK with it!A boat and lots of people growling 'Arrrrr!' and you have a TV program! The problem is the characters are as dull as the murky briny and there's no sense of a narrative to tell you why they are there... other than to go 'Arrrrr!' a lot!As the torture wears on the cast do unbelievably stupid things. I won't spoil this for you in case the MST3K crew wants to adopt this wreck and riff on it.This garbage should be thrown overboard and the people behind it keelhauled... slowly!

Solid but uninspired movie which could have been profitably edited down by around 45 minutes. I can't remember the original plot too well anymore, but I believe that this production does seem to reflect some modern liberal political sensibilities, which likely weren't there originally--in and of itself, this is a legitimately different twist to put on things, except that it throws a few forced clunkers into the script. The performances by Izzard as a subdued Silver and Wood as Jim are pretty strong, but, Sutherland, as with all of his later movies, is just cashing a paycheck and does not at all seem invested in, or appropriate to, the role. Also, as a long-time small boat sailor, it kind of drove me nuts that they never raised more sail than they did--my guess is that this is not historically accurate, but instead reflected the limited budget of the movie, meaning that they didn't want to shell out for the cost of additional sails for the ship. If the movie was going to be dragged out to three hours, I personally wanted a lot more exciting sailing action. The production values are not quite up to that of a theater quality film, but compare favorably to those of a top-notch TV production. A perfect movie to watch with children if one wants to avoid sex and extreme violence, but for a modern adult audience, as long as liberties were going to be taken, it could maybe have been a bit grittier. Still, I can't say that I feel that I have wasted three hours or anything like that, and I'm not really significantly disappointed in any way at all, except for the dearth of sailing action.

A reasonably interesting adaptation of the classic novel. Has the same basic plot as the novel but changes some of the characters' personalities, to varying degrees. Also grittier than the novel.Nice scenery, good action scenes, a decent degree of intrigue.On the negative side, there is a ho-humness to the proceedings. It is not overly engaging, and it sometimes does feel like it is going through the motions. The movie/series never really grabs you and drags you along with it.Performances are so-so. Eddie Izzard is fairly good as Long John Silver. Nobody else really stands out. Donald Sutherland has very little screen time.

OK my main gripe with this adaptation of the book is it takes too many liberties with the original story and the characters as well, Dr Livesey goes from the main hero to a sniveling coward, Squire Trelawney goes from a trustworthy leader to a two faced greedy tyrannical land owner and the protagonists don't turn on each other and Jim DOESN'T throw the loot overboard when its time to return home and he doesn't free Silver as in the original story its clear he doesn't trust him. Some of the back story of Blind Pew, Black Dog and their relationship with Long John Silver was explored however this removed the shock of the apple barrel scene when Jim overhears the pirates planning the mutiny which is one of the most iconic parts of the story, and in fact renders the whole scene pointless. That said in spite of those negatives there were a few positives with this adaptation, we finally got to see the infamous Captain Flint in person, played superbly by Donald Sutherland if only for a short time, the portrayal of Captain Smollett was one of the few character's the movie got right. Casting Caribbean actors in some of the roles was a clever touch as pirate crews at the time of the did tend to have people from that part of the world, although some of the choices were rather odd, mainly because the actors were generally too young to poetry their characters in a realistic fashion, Elijah Wood as Ben Gunn was such an example, in regard to Eddie Izzard as Long John Silver, again like most other apsects, not bad. So to sum up it was worth watching once but I won't bother watching it again.