A demonstration of the decline in western civilisation and culture, and the greed and excess we throw so freely around

Rating: 2/10 (14 September 2008)

The third instalment of the Pirates saga has racked up costs of $300 million. That's a lot of money â€“ a lot of money down the drain, or should I say, the huge CGI whirlpool featured in Pirates 3 which serves virtually no purpose, apart from to amuse. But by now, we are not amused.
I chose the word saga at the opening of this review for a reason. Because, collectively, the life-threateningly dull adventures of Gore Verbinski's characters has wasted 9 hours of my life. 9 hours I could of spent of doing anything else, watching repeats of 1980's sitcoms on unknown satellite channels, watching cricket, watching paint dry. Anything but surviving the trilogy which feels like a lifetime. You could take your newborn baby in to a screening of At World's End, and by time you leave, your baby will be a young boy. You will have skipped the nappy changing, the crying, the staying up all night. So, there is a silver lining to the very, dark looming cloud which is the son of cinema's Satan - Pirates 3.
By now, we can care little for the unforgivable mess which is the plot. Ships turning upside down, pirate leagues, rocks turning into crabs, an odd, mumbling witch who talks some of the biggest fantasy drivel ever committed to film. We've had enough, and the illusion which was the charm of the first pirate's film has worn off. Jack Sparrow is just a slow, bumbling character with annoyingly awkward dialogue and Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightly are so wooden they could be harvested and solve the world's problem of deforestation. The tone of the film is evidently undecided; we can go from a hanging scene involving children to a drunken Jonny Depp in a slapstick comedy scene. There's even an attempt at romance at the end of the film, but the scene is so graceless and discomforting it's like watching rhino's mating on the Discovery channel. Ugh, just ugh. That $300 million could have gone anywhere, it could fund 40 Godfather's, save African lives, anything but this.