Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Reviewed by Michelle Groene
Nearly 24 hours after a screening of this three-quel, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, I’m still feeling seasick. It’s clear that director Gore Verbinski, his team of writers (Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio), and the execs at Disney thought that if they just spent a lot of money on special effects and choreographed fight scenes, that it wouldn’t matter that the dialogue and performances were as choppy as the CGI-created water surrounding the beloved Black Pearl. They were dead wrong.
This third installment follows Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush, Munich), Will Turner (Orlando Bloom, Elizabethtown) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley, Domino) across the world – as the title would suggest, to the world’s end, even – to try and save Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) from the evil clutches of death that Davy Jones (Bill Nighy, Hot Fuzz) bestowed upon him in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. They find him hallucinating, in a moment that likens more to Depp’s role as Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as he confers with several doppelgangers about his predicament.
From there, battles on the high seas ensue as familiar faces like Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander, A Good Year) resurface as enemies, along with some new ones; notably Chow-Yun Fat (Bulletproof Monk) as Pirate Lord Sao Feng from Singapore. Quickly however, all the pirate lords join forces to defeat Beckett’s crew and of course, to recapture the heart of Davy Jones to obliterate him once and for all. To get much more into the plot would just further confuse you and lose whatever interest you already had in seeing POTC 3. It’s really that bad, and even more so, a waste of time.
What is not a waste of time is Keith Richards’ cameo (finally!) as Jack’s father; he’s only onscreen for two minutes, but his eyelinered-and-snarling appearance was the only moment in the film that had the audience cheering. If only that moment could have lasted longer, but unfortunately for us, we would only be facing more battle scenes, more boring love scenes between Will and Elizabeth (could there be a hot cinematic couple with less chemistry than those two?), more ridiculous dialogue and even a setup for a possible Pirates 4 for the remainder of the 168 minute-long film. The film had me the end of my rope far before the swashbuckling pirates reached the world’s end.
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