Not bad

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2007)

Less than a year after the previous installment of the popular pirates trilogy, Jack Sparrow and company return in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The film should be great, given a three hundred million dollar budget, huge anticipation, and the closure a third installment inevitably brings to a series. While this film does show its budget and is quite visually arresting, it lacks a fair share of resolution to the trilogy and confuses with its overflowing exposition rather than purely existing to entertain.
Even in an action packed pirate movie, overly chatty sequences will simply bore audiences just because it's too hard to follow what exactly is being said. The movie really just had too many vague or unnecessary plot points that didn't affect the main plot at hand.
All the acting was perfectly fine, with Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbosa unsurprisingly being the standouts. The introduction of Depp's character in the pirate equivalent of Hell called Davy Jones' Locker is a particular favorite, as well as the scenes at World's End, which somehow involves a giant, deep waterfall. Keith Richards' hyped cameo as Jack's father is nothing to go crazy for, he does a decent job, but his screen time lasts only about two minutes.
Director Gore Verbinski and his crew knew going into this that the reviews would be mixed and the plot would be confusing (in order to encourage repeat viewings), but honestly, at nearly three hours, the more the film confuses you the more it becomes an endurance test. Also, rather than providing a satisfying conclusion to the series, the end opens up the possibility for a fourth installment, which might not even happen. The crew put every penny of the film's budget on screen, made evident in the hour or so of its bloated climax. The film looks and feels like a true epic, shots are wide, locations are vast, costumes are extravagant, and the scope is large. However, the film needs to scale down its plot in order to let the characters we fell in love with stand out and shine, as that's what makes these films unique.