Shiver me timbers! Too long and too complicated, me buckos

Rating: 6/10 (18 June 2007)

Break out your books of hoary sea phrases, laddies and lassies, it's "At World's End," the third and (we hope) final installment of "Pirates of the Caribbean." Me 11-year-old daughter did think that this movie was "awesome," me buckos, but even she thought it was too long, just shy of three hours, and both of us had trouble following the plot. After about half an hour, I lost track of the dizzying succession of moves and countermoves, plots and counterplots, crosses and double-crosses. And it turns out that there was a post-credits scene that we missed, so ready were we to get out of there after the film ended. Unfortunately, constructing a comprehensible plot line seems to have been a lower priority---and got less of the budget---than the costumes, sets, special effects, and score, all of which seemed intended to assault the senses. I was disappointed to see that for all the effort at creating "realistic" visuals, the movie starts out with an anachronism: It opens in a Chinese bath house in Singapore, and soon after, British soldiers in the employ of the East India Company attack. Now, everything about the "Pirates" films---the clothing styles, the ships, the technology, the historical references---places them squarely in the much-romanticized Golden Age of Piracy. But owing to a major crackdown by Britain and the other European powers, this period was pretty much over by the 1720s. The British colony of Singapore would not be established by the British East India Company for another century (1819). Before that, it was an undistinguished fishing village inhabited by native Malays, not by the Chinese, who came in after the British.
But no matter: "At World's End" fairly drips (and I mean drips) with atmosphere, me hearties. There are more than enough pirate ships, creaking decks, steam-filled bath houses, stormy seas, long hair, shaven heads, leather, bad teeth, sweat, scarred, craggy faces, false eyeballs, powdered wigs, scimitars and sabers, whizzing cannon and pistol balls, splintering wood, fantastic monsters, and heathen spirits to go around. Great sea battles are fought in which ships are blown up with such frequency and regularity that you wonder that anything is left afloat, yet the characters hardly seem to notice. You can tell when the big action scenes are beginning, because when they do, it always starts to rain.
Johnny Depp's semi-dandified portrayal of Jack Sparrow, and his faux British accent, are definitely wearing thin. Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, by playing it straight, are much more enjoyable. But to have their characters marry each other in the middle of an all-out sea battle (in the rain, of course) stretches credulity way past the snapping point. Yo ho ho, lots of exasperated scoffing from the audience we were among here, cap'n. Geoffrey Rush is essentially doing a modified Long John Silver impersonation as Captain Barbossa. Keith Richards plays Captain Teague, Jack Sparrow's father and the keeper of the Pirates' Code for the Brethren Court. It is shocking to see his old, lined, craggy face; he has a "smoker's face" and a "smoker's voice." I have always figured that it would not be the drugs of his youth that would kill him, but rather his tobacco abuse. Chow Yun-Fat, who despite his history of acting in extremely violent films is a very likable actor, mugs so outrageously for the camera in his role as Sao Feng that it reminded me of James Finlayson in the old Laurel and Hardy movies. And half a century of BBC costume dramas notwithstanding, nobody really sounded like that, mateys; the familiar "standard" British accent, with its dropped R's and its forward-shifted vowels, did not gain any general currency in Britain until the 19th century; before that, it was actually considered vulgar.
This film definitely looks and sounds impressive on the big screen, but if you wait till it comes out on video, you'll be able to take breaks when it all gets to be too much, and you'll also be able to run it back and watch parts again when you are trying to figure out what on earth is going on. (Maybe they planned it that way.) What really depresses me is that for most of the prodigiously ignorant American children of the past few generations, this is as close as they will ever get to Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, or Daniel Defoe.