Absurdity rules at World's End

Rating: 5/10 (29 May 2007)

This comment may contain minor spoilers.
I greatly enjoyed the first Pirates movie because it brought something new and fresh in the world of Hollywood blockbusters. The Dead Man's Chest was in many ways below original, the story had much more chaos and less common sense. However despite all its flaws the second movie still was entertained enough to keep you on the edge of your seat and enjoy the show for two and a half hours.
I wish I could have said the same about the third. The charm and romance ultimately have gone and instead of them all what we've got is visually attractive but totally ridiculous marriage scene and some pretty week dialogs all over the movie. In a few minutes it's also became clear that the Pirates of the Caribbean is not the movie for the young ones anymore. The scene of hanging in the beginning was so much over the top that it made me cringe. Of course the first two parts of trilogy probably deserved PG-13 rating but they hardly contained any strongly unappreciated for young children material. Now the movie based on Disney's theme park, which attracted children with their parents from all over the world, has lost family audience.
There is nothing original at the World's End, everything what was brand-new, funny and enjoyable in first movie now became annoying and at best it's worth only a few cheap laughs. The script is a total mess where one preposterous scene change another with ridiculous, though technically solid and impressive visuals. What is even worse is that somewhere towards the middle of the movie the characters become almost uninteresting to the audience. With all these inexplicable plot twists and continual betrayal from anyone there's no point to care about our heroes. No matter who will die or who will survive and all that remains is idle curiosity what will happen next, where incredibly wild imagination of the screenwriters finally could bring us. All possible attempts to make things add up eventually failed and in the results writers got lost in the labyrinth of betrayals and plot twists they constructed. There is no point to tell anything about dialogs  nearly everything is banal and clichéd.
The acting is pretty much the same as in two previous parts. Johnny Depp has much less screening time now and his character is not in the center of all events. Somehow it happened what Captain Barbosa who was the main villain in first movie now became actually the most attractive and worthy character. The main antagonist  nearly almighty Lord Beckett is just a bloodthirsty murderer who maniacally chase our heroes all other world without a clear reason. Elizabeth looks like a curse for everyone who fell in love with her or just approached her and Will is as always indecisive and unpredictable. I don't think that was the way the audience wanted and there is no much logic about all of this. The final battle is a complete theater of the absurd. No one has any idea where those enormous fleets (absolutely impossible for that period) came from and what was looking as the greatest sea battle of all-time turned into long duel between two ships with its strange conclusion.
Visuals in the movie are pretty good, sometimes impressive or even spectacular but with too many plot holes, wide discrepancies and lack of logical ties all other the movie they can't save the third adventure of the Pirates from sinking. It's remarkable how strongly screenwriters did their best trying to avoid mentioning any real names or locations on world map. Singapore is the only one place that connect the movie with the real world but this connection is lame in historically inaccurate because there was no British in Singapore in that time, only harmless fishermen and small Portuguese, later Dutch outpost. The entire movie looks like a box of candy with beautiful cover but bitter to taste. The commercial product was made and delivered to customers and the studio is already counting thousands of gold coins coming from all over the world. The final became one more proof that future sequels are quite possible but it's just a matter of money and in the extreme case they can always rise anyone from dead or go even further to make hundreds of million dollars.
Anyway it's worth to see what became of potentially one of the all-time best trilogies or as we can say now potentially endless franchise, but if you're interested in more than preposterous conglomerations of visuals, long but pointless battle scenes and cheap jokes you might be disappointed. The poor storyline ruined nearly everything.