Dead in the water

Rating: 5/10 (30 May 2007)

Mark Kermode memorably described Dead Man's Chest  the bloated and ever so slightly creaky sequel to the 2003 Johnny Depp jokefest as the 'death of Western civilisation'. That kind of criticism is ridiculous of course, the second Pirates movie was far worse than that, but assuming he judged the scale of the artistic degeneracy correctly, At World's End is just that  the end of the friggin' world.
It's fair to say that the original film was far better than an adaptation of a theme park ride had any right to be, though the script for Alton Tower's ghost train is rumoured to be incredible  apparently Robert Towne's greatest since Chinatown. Its pantomime humour and breezy swashbuckling plot felt like a fresh wind blowing through a room of soul crushing sequels. Johnny Depp hammed it up and somehow captured the admiration of the entire world; the world showcasing its egregious taste in the process. An Oscar nomination followed, that's right an Oscar nomination for Christ's sake, which thankfully didn't translate to a win but nevertheless seemed, like the box office, out of all proportion to the quality of the film that had been made. It was not too bad, overlong and an intermittently exciting affair. Orlando Bland and Kiera Knightley provided the good looks and teeth but characterisation was a plush bounty that remained hidden and on the evidence that made it into cinemas, safe from seeking filmmakers.
Disney couldn't quite believe how much it had made, which made two of us and sticking to the business model now well established in light of Back to the Future and the Matrix, two sequels were green lit to be made back to back to maximise the potential box office and allow two visits to the well while the series was still popular.
So, inevitably the tonic to those summer sequels of many a year ago is now responsible for summer sequels of its own. Talk about irony sitting on your face without invitation and jostling from side to side.
The problem with making two sequels back to back is that the temptation, so far irresistible to the 'creatives' at the helm, is to make one long film and split it in two. This way you give the audience an incentive to return for the second sequel, effectively locking them into it. It's a bad move, principally because the second film is inevitably open ended and the third, lacking a self-contained plot, begins abruptly and relies on the audience's foreknowledge of characters and incident to work. Artistically you may think it would be better to make two self-contained movies with their own resolved story lines  perhaps the merest hint of a joining plot thread deftly inserted to act as that cliffhanger. Well, wouldn't you?
But Disney didn't do that and so at World's end begins where the old film left off with all manor of plot threads bleeding in from the previous movie. The finished film just sort of meanders along, joining up the characters, then splitting them up, then uniting them again while contrivance buggers incident follows setpiece and repeats en route to the show stopping conclusion. It's so long that when the certificate came up I'm pretty sure there were real pirates still on the high seas and that the cinema I was sitting in was just the lunatic daydream of an old seadog, albeit a seadog with an extraordinary scientific imagination.
Initially it seems as if the middle tenet of a pirate's life  rum, sodomy and the lash, is missing from the series all together but as the third part went on you realised it was there alright, just symbolically afflicting the audience. Did Verbinski have his script and film editor killed? On this evidence someone should be looking into it. A DVD of this would surely be enough to send Gore to the gallows.
One area that should be praised however, is ILM's special effects which are simply superb and occasionally, and somewhat impressively in this era of CGI saturated boredom, genuinely exciting to look at. The film's climax, which comes sometime during the movie's 15th hour, is a triumph of computer animation and pyrotechnic excess. The sheer all consuming nature of it and the pace at which every digitally stuffed frame is cut together, is the right side of breathtaking and yes, a ship cannoned to destruction in slow motion as it's captain walks down her stairs may be pure Bruckheimer balls-out action porn but that wood shattering goodness is stunning to look at. It goes on for a long long time certainly, in fact I dropped my popcorn during the third act because of the onset of acute arthritis, but in the absence of wit, economic plotting or a real story it's by far the best reason to see this groaning behemoth drag itself over 168 waterlogged minutes.
Ironically unlikely to be affected too much by online piracy  it made a shocking $401M around the stupid world over it's first weekend  the third Pirate's film stretches one pantomime turn across three movies, one of them okay, and in doing so shows that deprivation of quality in all other departments, bar those effects people of course, is no barrier to success on an earth shattering scale. It may not be a good advertisement for cinema but many, Michael Bay for one, will have slept better once they'd seen the film and taken in the figures, while others like old school blockbuster veterans Spielberg and Zemeckis will wonder why they ever bothered in the first place. The storytelling values of 40's and 70's Hollywood are as much under threat as Depp's pirates but unlike Sparrow and crew, it's no laughing matter.