What you have here is Crowe still thinking that he's the greatest actor that ever lived.

That all takes away the fun of a movie that had the potential to be a high seas epic like, say, Captain Blood.

Peter Weir lets Crowe go crazy and you can almost taste the ego dripping out of the pours of every seen, so much so that he doesn't allow Paul Bettany to shine and he's a good actor in his own right, as is James D'Arcy and again, Crowe seems to want to hog all the acting glory there too.

Honestly, its hard to sit down and watch a man try to upstage everyone in every scene, especially when they are actors that could hold their own against Crowe...if Crowe allowed that to happen.

So, you get to sit back and watch ego and that gets boring.

It's a shame, the script and directing were there, it could have been a great film if we didn't just see ego shine.