By Kevin McCarthy

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END begins with a long line of pirates being sent to the gallows.  With The Flying Dutchman under the control of the British Royal Navy, the Crown has established a no-tolerance policy towards piracy.  Those who survive an encounter with Davy Jones and crew must die by the hangman’s noose.  Who will come to the rescue of this defenseless lot?  I only hope the same fate will befall the thieves behind a movie that made an estimated $125 million in its opening weekend.  But I digress.  Okay then.  There you go, filmmakers, you have renewed our compassion for the pirates.  I daresay Captain Jack Sparrow would be a fine choice for Pirate Hero, but wait a minute.  They sent him off to Davy Jones’ locker at the end of DEAD MAN’S CHEST.  Well, what then?

Luckily for nobody, the writers behind the PIRATES sequel faithfully adhere to the MATRIX trilogy school of thought.  That is to say, the sequels choose to throw in a wealth of new characters and plot contrivances that have little to do with the themes of the original.  It has been a while, so I’ll forgive you if you’ve forgotten how ridiculous the plot to DEAD MAN’S CHEST was.  It was the most overly complicated Disney movie ever.  Well, until AT WORLD’S END wrestled that prize away, like the garter at Hilton family wedding.  This movie runs almost three hours long.  From beginning to end, the film is packed with enough double-crosses and schemes to completely lose the casual viewer within an hour, and even a dedicated reviewer about halfway through.  Then, they throw in a character that makes THE MATRIX’s The Architect seem reasonable.

So, obviously they rescue Captain Sparrow from the other side and return to the world of the living (by a method so terrible I wished I had brain damage).  This sets the stage for a massive gathering of the all the world’s pirates and an end game battle against Davy Jones and the British Fleet.  Johnny Depp’s character is always the best part of these movies and he carries another strong performance into AT WORLD’S END.  He’s said he wants to revisit this character in the future and part of me actually hopes that he does. In any event, we all know he’d rake in a ton of cash.  Orlando Bloom has surpassed boring and actually became annoying for me.  He falls miles short of being a worthy rival to Depp.  And this makes his continued romance with Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Swann increasingly puzzling. Knightley is gorgeous and takes on a more prominent role in this third installment after spending most of the previous film in a jail cell.  The writers try hard to make her a full-fledged pirate, but the transformation only seems natural because the audience hasn’t seen THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL in a long time.  There’s also the monkey.  I love monkeys – especially evil ones – but whenever the script called for a cute laugh, they gave the guy a close-up. This may seem like a small thing, but it’s just an indication of how lazy Elliott and Rossio have become.

Most of the good parts of this film are the same reasons I put up with DEAD MAN’S CHEST.  The CGI in POTC3 is predictably stunning.  Verbinski is a really good director.  And, much like a Ridley Scott, he sprinkles this popular film with a lot of beautiful shots.  I was particularly impressed with the long shots of the ships at sea.  They really invited a lot of wonder into the movie.  Seriously.  But where he has previously dazzled with action scenes, this film was surprisingly light on fun swashbuckling action.  This is a three-hour pirate movie with far too much plodding exposition and far too little stabbing.  I really wanted to enjoy PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END.  Most of the people in the theater with me had a good time.  I left the theater among a lot of cheerful mumbling and I felt guilty that maybe I was holding a Disney movie to too high a standard.  But I can’t in good conscience call POTC3 a good movie.  Feel free to chime in if you disagree.