They really don’t make adventure movies like this anymore. Everybody in this is at their best. We talk about Johnny Depp a lot, obviously, but Geoffrey Rush is a scene stealer and an all-time great villain in my opinion.
But they clearly spent a lot of time working on this script, and they hired an intelligent director to bring it all together. Somehow these two incredibly important parts get skipped these days. Gore Verbinski directs the heck out of this, and while the effects don’t look as good as they did when the film was released, this flick really holds up.