Didn't anybody tell you? Piracy is over.

Rating: 3/10 (4 July 2007)

The latest Pirates of the Caribbean film had one of the highest box-office opening weekends of all time. It had a record 4,362 US theatre openings and has now taken over $700million worldwide. With the number of people going to see At World's End, you'd be forgiven for thinking the world actually was coming to an end, and we'd decided the only people we could trust were mega film stars. But this POTC is neither a fitting end to human history or to a popular franchise.
With all the logic of the Flat Earth Society comes a series of plots that attempt to intertwine like cords of a rope, but aren't nearly as well put together as the ones we will see pirates flying about on towards the films climax. Johnny Depp returns as Captain Jack Sparrow, whose unstable and seemingly drunken daft antics are compounded after he spends some time in Davey Jones' Locker, with multiple versions of himself and lots of crabs. The character is a bright spot in the film, though with so many returning and new characters he barely makes it through as protagonist. Chow Yun-Fat, Geoffrey Rush and others deliver great performances, but anyone hoping for an escape from Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner's brain-punchingly annoying romance will have no such luck. The various stories are complicated, but not clever, and the overall sense of pointlessness leads the film to fall back on the pretty people. Yet even this fails to make comprehensive sense and is laden with ham-fisted clichés. You can watch previous installment Dead Man's Chest  from which this conjoins heavily  immediately before viewing, and still not make head or tail of it. It's not surprising to learn that shooting began when the script wasn't finished.
As always, Orlando Bloom acts with the personality of a ships plank. Whether he is on the brink of being killed or conversing epically with the love of his life, he comes across as the character who can't quite believe he is lucky enough to be in such a cool situation, who must gruff his voice and squint his eyes. Acting can be seen a mile off, they say, but in the case of this well-scrubbed pirate, you'll wish your eyes were a mile away.
Keira Knightley doesn't fare much better. The series has tried to build her princess character into a tough deck-swabber, but it fails spectacularly to convince. When she makes a pre-battle speech to her comrades, you cringe for everyone in the room and in the scene. As in Domino, it's impossible to believe Knightley can kick anyone's arse, rotting zombie swashbucklers or not. And she never washes the floor once before becoming Queen of the Seas. Typical.
The jokes are poor (monkeys, rum) and between scenes just so we can take a break from trying to understand what's going on, if we haven't given up already. With the brainlessness that comes from knowing you've got a Disneyfied hit on your hands the script tosses in references of everything from The Little Mermaid to The Godfather (the latter via a line from Tom Hollanders bad guy character Lord Beckett, butchered in the way only a business pirate could do  The East India Company being the first big monopoly trying to be hip).
The very long final action scene, although as illogical as the rest, is certainly impressive - but it's not worth sitting through the rest for it. Indecisive as always, the film doesn't know how to end, leaving just enough opening for a possible third sequel to scrape through pathetically, covered in seaweed and lacking imagination. Pieces of Eight? They should cut their losses and stop at three.
3/10