I watched this on DVD over the weekend.
I can't honestly say I was impressed. Where the second one failed because of the overly-complicated jiggery-pockery plot shenanigans but at least had plenty of action and comedy, this one seemed to pretty much do away with the action and comedy, leaving... well, leaving a turd.
I mean classic example of what was wrong: Captain Jack doesn't even appear in the film for the first 20 minutes. The hero is absent for a good chunk of the film.
Now that chunk of 20 minutes should have made it easy for me to say a "quarter" or a "fifth" of the film but there you have another problem - it was way, way too long. It was about 2hrs45mins long - nearly 3 hours! That's just silly length for a film like this.
And what's worse is they seemed to stick in a whole load of Chinese characters that added absolutely nothing to the film, but did still pad it out.
I mean I can sort of see some of the problems they had. On the commentary for the second film the writers complained about how they struggled to make these two seem like part of a proper, planned trilogy. That means they had to introduce all sorts of stuff and spend ages doing exposition to explain it all.
Trouble is that decision was utterly flawed - they should just have made 3 separate films which just happened to have the same character in. At the very end of this one there's a sort of thing about the search for the fountain of youth.
I don't think it was a direct set-up for a sequel - more sort of a "here we go again" moment. And that's what all 3 of these films should have been like - just some random adventure. There was no need to tie everything together with an overarching plot, just have it be "well here we go again".
The DVD was rubbish too - literally the only extras were some bloopers, no commentaries or anything.
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