Captain Jack leaves with style... Yo ho!

Rating: 6/10 (27 May 2007)

So, this is it: another massively popular blockbuster franchise reaches its conclusion. After Spider-Man and Shrek, it is time to say goodbye to Pirates of the Caribbean (and Jason Bourne will follow in a few months), although, like many other number 3s, At World's End vaguely suggests a fourth movie would not be impossible to make (and we will see what Bruckheimer thinks about it once the cash starts rolling in). Still, should this be the last Pirates, it isn't a bad epilogue, though not a truly brilliant one either.
Picking up about a month after the events of Dead Man's Chest, the third episode opens on a surprisingly dark note: with Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) "dead" (actually, he's stuck in some sort of Purgatory) and Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) working for Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), piracy is facing extinction, as shown in the prologue, where dozens of people, including a young boy, are hung without a fair trial. All hope is not lost, though, as a small group of rebels, led by Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) is reuniting pirate leaders from all over the world to come up with a plan to get back their control over the sea. The only problem is, one player is missing: time to bring Jack back...
That is when the film really starts: no offense to the rest of the cast, but POTC's success depends entirely on Johnny Depp, and so it is slightly frustrating to have to wait half an hour for his entrance. But once he arrives, it was completely worth the wait: adding new nuances and quirks to the character, Depp is shamelessly entertaining from start to finish, whether he is talking to himself (the "multiple Jacks" scenes are hilarious) or interacting with others (especially Rush and Knightley). His charisma is what keeps the movie on track, especially in the third act, where it is all too obvious writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio finished the script when filming had already begun: some inconsistencies are given a rushed (and a little pompous) explanation (e.g. how come Jack's resurrection was much more complicated than Barbossa's ?), others are not explained at all, and while it is a joy to see the balance between action (Black Pearl vs. Flying Dutchman: a visual treat) and laughs (the two moronic soldiers from the first film finally return after an inexplicable absence in Dead Man's Chest, and Keith Richards' cameo is comedy gold as expected) is intact, the story's complexity seems to slip out of control in places, probably because unlike Sam Raimi, who constructed the similarly flawed Spider-Man 3 starting from elements he had introduced in the first two films, the writing duo behind Pirates created a huge mythology almost separately from the first installment. Whereas Curse of the Black Pearl featured only one ambiguous character (Captain Sparrow) in an otherwise linear series of events, this time everyone betrays everyone, making At World's End move from twist to twist, even after the climactic showdown, providing an extra fifteen minutes (and the entire film lasts almost three hours) that are, for the most part, skippable.
And yet I liked the movie, and I am willing to forgive those missteps. Why? Because at the end of this overblown, but spectacular and tremendously fun ride, everyone realizes what Pirates of the Caribbean was about in the first place: the trilogy started with Jack, and it ends (?) with Jack. And that, my friends, is good enough to justify the excessive running time.
6,5/10