a mixed bag of big clever epic tricks and plots convoluted

Rating: 6/10 (30 May 2007)

At one point, after Captain Jack Sparrow has escaped from the ship of the Lord Beckett, one of the officers says about Sparrow "Do you think he plans it all out, or just makes it up as he goes along?" Much can be said about the bulk of (or maybe just all) of the third and possibly final installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The script, in actuality, wasn't finished before filming started, and it shows: the screenwriters, or Verbinski, or Bruckheimer or whomever it was, have here a picture where pretty much not one character of significant note doesn't have some sort of personal vendetta, or double-cross, or triple cross, or some kind of love interest that has to be existent only through massive circumstances of trouble and fate, or that they're just one-note argh pirates or corrupt British officers. At the same time, there are nuggets here that mark as being sublime and utterly riotously funny, and even mark as being some of the best scenes that the series has to offer. But there's so much to get through to get to the worthwhile bits that it's not worth it- not for the 11 bucks for a ticket anyway.
It will be a subjective thing of note on whether or not the movie will work based on the universe that the POTC movies rest in- which is when 'up is down', and the Pirates vs British dynamics. But it ends up being, for me anyway, having to find the scenes and moments that do work versus what doesn't, which are the weighty scenes of exposition (eg characters stand around explaining the plot, which maybe is part of the ironic twist from the filmmakers), set-up, re-set-up, and still MORE exposition during what should be the most intense sequences. Basically, we get introduced to Calypso- a much frightened myth of Pirate lore who once had a love, or maybe not totally a love per-say, and is locked away in someone's soul by Pirate mandate. There's also Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun Fat, who actually doesn't show much here except for the excess grimacing and gestures proclaiming "I'm a bad-ass Asian dude too good to stroke his beard), and his floggle of Singapore pirates. Then there's the whole committee of pirates. Then the dynamics of Barbosa vs Sparrow, Sparrow and Barbosa vs Davy Jones, Will Turner vs Davy Jones (to get to his father, who is 'part of the ship'). Then Elizabeth becomes a pirate captain and Calypso is released, and so on and so forth.
The idea of charting the course of action leading to war between the royal British fleet and the league of extraordinary pirates sounds interesting, but it doesn't come off that way. Even when the climax comes, there's still goofy and corny bits thrown in (and not of the good kind ala 'oh, a monkey shot out of a cannon, so rich'), including marriage during a big battle scene (not as bad as the monkey, but the kiss between Turner and Swann is a true Bruckheimer cringe moment). Now, this all being said, it isn't necessarily a completely worthless enterprise. Far from it, there is a chunk of the near three hour running time- say, 15 to 20 minutes- that are near perfect and actually unconventional without trying to go out of its way to mask its shallowness. Jack Sparrow, as played by the ever so versatile, crafty and wackily engaging Johnny Depp, is stuck in Davy Jones's locker when he first appears, and it's something that one might expect out of Jodorowsky as opposed to a huge summer blockbuster: multiple Sparrows going nutty, rocks turning into crabs, Sparrow trying to pull the ship, which starts to move on its own, all starting with a peanut. It's a sheer act of surrealistic bravura film-making, aside from Depp's comedic brilliance, and it's maybe my favorite single sequence from any of the Pirates movies (at least a contender with the best skeleton pirates from the first film). When Sparrow ends up seeing his fellow 'selves', at one point coming out of his ear, it's equally uproarious, if still a little shallow, and it leads up to the exceptional appearance of Keith Richards Sparrow's Pirate King father.
This, plus the usual allotment of visually eye-catching visual effects, albeit with not much new that wasn't seen character-wise in the second entry (and all the big energy in that department is saved for the big climax in the ocean, which goes on for almost half an hour more or less), do mark At Worlds End at containing the inspired craziness and exciting pleasures of the first film. But all the same, as it goes on and on, and on, you almost need a chart to count down who betrays who or who does what to the other; this would be all well and good if one could give a darn about the emotional stakes at hand, but it's a case of not a lot of 'there' being there, not assisted by (aside from Depp, Rush and sometimes Nighy) one-note performances and even wooden turns (Tom Hollander).