PotC: At World's End

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (**)

The Pirates movies have been perhaps not the most important movies made as of late, but they have worked as entertaining escapist adventure movies. The third leg of the trilogy, At World's End, however tries to do way too much, and ends up being more exhausting than anything else. Even though there was a significant cliffhanger at the end of the second film leading into At World's End, in many ways the first two films were basically self-contained. Curse of the Black Pearl centered around Jack Sparrow and company facing off against Barbosa's crew for the cursed Aztec treasure, while Dead Man's Chest centered around Jack's debt to Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman. In contrast, At World's End's plot is incredibly complex, incorporating characters from both of the two films, who create a number of entangling and changing alliances with each other. I don't know if the last two films were planned out when the first was created, but watching this movie, some of the new things revealed about the characters certainly seem forced to try and fit them into this web of intrigue. All this would be well and good if it added up to something great at the end, but the film's climax, nor any other part of it, is really any more exciting than the sequences that the first two movies culminated with after much less set-up.

If you've seen the first movie you know that (highlight) Jack is dead, and that Barbosa and company are setting out to find him and bring him back. The movie begins with them in Singapore stealing maps to "Davy Jones' locker" to accomplish this task. They meet Chow-Yun Fat, who is sort of wasted as a largely uninteresting pirate captain local to Singapore. They, of course, eventually find Jack, but not before a surrealistic scene of Jack in a sort of purgatory which is mildly amusing but which goes on for way too long. The movie gets more ridiculous from there, as the British navy and the East India Company tries to use Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman as an enforcer for their own aims. Barbosa and Jack decide that a conference needs to be held with the nine Pirate captains from all over the world to try and stop them, lest pirates become extinct. The entire notion of a pirate council seems too far over the top. The series obviously never attempted to be realistic, but when all the pirates gather around a table in their own crazy looking, stereotypical ethic costumes it almost reaches self-parody (and yes, Keith Richards is in it).

Jack is still funny, the action is still visually cool, and there are a lot of moments which put a smile on your face, but the attempt at adding multiple plot twists and creating a huge web of entangling alliances between the characters is just a bad idea. What results is a convoluted plot that detracts from the simple sense of adventure which is the reason why the series is popular for people other than the 13-year old Jack Sparrow demographic. The movie's run time is three hours, which was fine for an epic like Lord of the Rings, but just exhausting in this case.