Drink Up Me Hearties, Yo Ho !

Rating: 6/10 (29 December 2009)

Jack Sparrow's old crew, searching for their missing Captain, travel to Singapore to find a secret passage to World's End. Meanwhile, the East India Trading Company is plotting a fiendish scheme to rid the world of pirates forever. Will our heroes find Jack, and keep the seas free for honourable cut-throats and mercenaries ?
The third Pirates Of The Caribbean movie is perhaps a bit stodgy compared to the other two, but is still rollicking good fun. It picks up where Dead Man's Chest left off, as our heroes rescue Jack from the doldrums of Davy Jones Locker, but then meanders into a complicated series of double-crosses as the Pirate Brethren unite to fight the combined forces of the British Armada and The Flying Dutchman. It starts well, introducing a new player, Singapore buccaneer Sao Feng, and sails through some amazing ice vistas to find Jack gone mad (more than usual) with isolation and seeing visions of himself. It gets a bit bogged down in the middle with confusing moments (Pryce's death is never seen but his afterlife is) and an over-reliance on Elizabeth's character, but then perks up for a fantastic rain-soaked battle royal finale complete with Jack and Davy Jones fighting atop a mast in the grand Peter Pan style. As before, Verbinski's direction, Rich Heinrichs' eye-popping production design and the visual effects by John Knoll and Roger Guyett are all fantastic, with almost every scene a visual treat to savour. The cast still all seem to be having a fine time (it was shot back to back with its predecessor), with Depp as nutty as ever ("Res ispa loquitur tabula in naufragio !"), Knightley and Bloom trying to be heroic, Rush relishing his return, a scar-faced Chow enlivening the first half, and Nighy and Stellan Skarsgård both getting to play one scene without their hideous makeup. There's also an unmissable cameo by Rolling Stones legend Keith Richards as Captain Teague, the Keeper of the Pirate Code (and Jack's Dad). All in all it's great stuff, but it does go on a bit too long, with a few too many story threads, not quite enough of Jack falling over, and not as much of a sense of fun as the previous two movies. That said though, any film with a scene where someone says, "Nobody move - I've dropped me brain.", cannot be missed.