Forgets to be fun and is overly serious, plodding, dull and weakly acted while Depp is sidelined for reasons best known to the makers (spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (31 May 2007)

There are some films where I must concede that maybe I'm just not getting it and am not seeing what everyone else in the world is seeing because with this third and final film in the Pirates series, I find myself reading the reviews and looking at the ratings and juts shaking my head. Did everyone else sit in the same film as myself? From my point of view I might as well repost my review of the first sequel because all the same problems are there (which I suppose means if you like that you'll like this). The first film surprised me by just being good old fashioned fun carried almost wholly on the back on a wonderfully risky performance from Depp that rightly earned him an Oscar nod.
However that key part of the first film seems to have been forgotten in the sequels as "fun" is very thin on the ground as the conclusion continues an "epic" story that is built on characters I found hard to care for and a narrative that stutters where the original just flowed along with a wink and a grin. It is all to serious and full of ideas and threads that go nowhere. I found it endlessly frustrating that the film would ask me to follow the character connections only to have them go nowhere of value. The most laughable example of me was the building up of "Calypso" only for her to turn into a load of crabs and produce a bit of a whirlpool that doesn't seem to bother too many people in the final battle scenes.
With this story, Captain Jack (surely the only character anyone likes) is almost made a marginal character in his own film. Having been carried by Jack in the first film, the focus seems to have shifted to Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, both of whom resemble their own cardboard cut-outs you see in the multiplex lobbies. Their "romance" is annoying and I found their battle-scene marriage to be hilarious (although I suspect this was not the intention). One or two scenes are amusing but mostly it is all too earnest and heavy and I found myself bored and caring less and less with every passing scene. The effects continue to be good but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should; ignoring this we end up with all sorts of silliness ending up with a dizzyingly daft series of fights as the camera spins all around the place.
The cast is deep with familiar and famous faces and in theory they should benefit from having a script with so many interactions, betrayals etc. Of course the script does leave many of them hanging but the biggest failing for me was the way the film is put on the shoulders of the two people least able to carry it, namely Knightly and Bloom. In the first film it was obvious that they weren't really up to the task but they are left really exposed here and can't raise their game to the task. Depp is good as he was in the other films but he is very much sidelined and he only has a handful of moments where he gets the material to work with. The support cast are actually OK but they mostly drive the film to the more serious side. Nighy and Harris are handed bigger characters but left in the lurch by a script that was using them rather than utilising them. Davenport, Pryce, Skarsgård and others are all fine. Rush is a bit too hammy to fit in the newly serious film; some add some nice comic touches but a cameo from Keith Richards is a painfully pointless affair that is at least mercifully short.
Overall then, another step away from what made the original film so good  fun. With little of that on offer I was left with an overly heavy plot, average performances, impressive but OTT special effects and performances that ranged from the serviceable (the majority) to the weak (Bloom and Knightly) while someone seems to have decided to barely use the best weapon in the arsenal and mostly sidelines Depp's wonderful Jack Sparrow. This was my first of the 2007 threequels and I hope they get better than this.