Pirates Sink at Sea

Rating: 3/10 (14 January 2009)

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is the sequel to the very popular Dead Man's Chest. And like it's prequel it just doesn't live up to the expectations that Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl laid on it. Dead Man's Chest ends with a huge cliff-hanger where the cast of characters agree they must go to the ends of the Earth to save Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) makes a cameo and sets up his character for the sequel. This is about as good as At World's End gets and the film hasn't even started.
Dead Man's Chest was a decent, tolerable movie that made some amount of sense. At World's End, decides that it would rather not make any sense and that it will run around outside the lines its prequel set for it. In Dead Man's Chest the reason they go back to save Captain Sparrow is because they are all depressed about his passing. In At World's End, it is determined that they need to revive Jack because he is a pirate lord (the concept of pirate lords is something I'll get to shortly). Which, for myself, throws the movie back into the same hole Dead Man's Chest set up for me. No one likes anyone, even though the prequel left me with some small hope that At World's End would have the characters get along or at least to some extent, like they did in the first movie. But this never occurred. Everybody wants to kill everybody, and anyone will team up with anyone else to kill the person they want killed. Pirate Lord Sao Feng (Chow Yun Fat) bargains with William Turner (Orlando Bloom) to trade the black pearl for Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) once both are recovered. There is another part in the film in wince two deals between characters are revealed, both dishonoured and action is taken on each. That is the story of the movie, deals that lead to betrayals. The only character, who seems to stay true to his agreements, is Jack Sparrow. This adds confusion for viewers of the film, as well as predictability for a second or third time.
Another problem with the film is that there really is no real main plot. The movie is comprised of a whole bunch of subplots which are either not finished or they finish to spawn two or three more subplots. Every single character has there own objectives and sometimes more than one objective, which they all pursue through trickery and deceit. In Dead Man's Chest, there was a main objective, shared by all characters, to find Davy Jones' heart. The plot (for the last half of the film) was based around finding this heart. This objective reoccurs in At World's End, but it is in a different form and it's very minor. There are a few notable subplots, but when you try to think of one of them as the main plot, you remember another subplot that seems of greater or equal importance.
At World's End has another flaw. It has a tendency to abruptly end things it started that have great significance earlier in the film. A perfect example of this is when our adventurous pirates stumble upon the dead corpse of the infamous Kraken. The Kraken, the creature that caused Jack Sparrow and friends (though I can't call them friends) so much grief in the previous film, was just lying on the ground dead from cancer I guess. There was no explanation for its death, except that supposedly Davy Jones killed it as an order, but I only figured that out by reading the Wikipedia article on it (sad thing is I couldn't catch that the three times I sat through this god awful film). At that time Barbossa says "Still thinking about running, Jack? Think you can outrun the world? ...You know, the problem with being the last of anything, is that by and by, there be none left at all." Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End should very well be one of the last of its kind and personally I hope that it is the last one left.
All in all, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is bad movie. Not only is it a bad movie, but it is a bad movie that makes little to no sense. You can look at any part of the film and you will find something that will puzzle you, or that will just stop you and make you think "wait what?" So to contradict this senseless film, I will bestow on it a rating that does make sense, a 1.5 out of 5.
1.5/5 or 3/10 just for IMDb