Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End

May 24, 2007

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 168 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I enjoyed the first PIRATES movie, the second not nearly as much. This third (and final?) one is somewhat sluggish like the second movie, but it’s overall a better film.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End Unfortunately, I forgot the details of both previous PIRATES movies as soon as I finished watching them, and this third film doesn’t have a lot of exposition, so I wasn’t always completely sure what was going on. Maybe a STAR WARS-style scroll at the beginning would have helped. But it’s not particularly important; these films are about the spectacle, and Johnny Depp doing his Jack Sparrow thing.

Barbarro (Geoffrey Rush) is back in this one. At this point, I can’t remember if he’s a dead guy, or a formerly dead guy whose curse has been removed and is now a living guy. He and Our Heroes embark to rescue Jack Sparrow from the underworld.

Jack Sparrow, meanwhile, finds himself in a peculiar Pirate’s Hell that is slowly driving him mad. Well, madder.

I’m struck by how the geography of the world in these movies must be different from our own. Continents don’t seem to exist, just islands. Going from the Caribbean to Singapore (without a ship) then to the Arctic then back to the Caribbean doesn’t seem to be inconvenienced by South America or Africa. I imagine it’s something like Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea.

There’s a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo. Everybody seems to have a curse on them; this guy’s curse can only be lifted by assembling the eight shards of Captain Morgan’s magical broken rum bottle, or that guy’s curse requires the four pieces of Blackbeard’s magical dagger be reassembled. I can’t help but think that if these movies were more cartoony versions of MASTER AND COMMANDER rather than all these video game quests, they’d be better movies.

Here we learn that pirates are a world-wide secret society with nine Pirate Captains comprising the board of directors, apparently going back centuries.

Also, God is apparently a pirate, because the infrastructure of the universe seems to be based on piratey stuff.

We have a lot of ships chasing other ships. At times it’s a bit hard to keep track of who is on whose ship and why. The squidly Captain Davy Jones is back, but he’s being controlled by evil British merchants from the East India Company. There’s also a God-thing with a bad case of the crabs.

We have a lot of sword fights, of course, and various scenes of ships being raked by cannonballs.

Ultimately, it boils down to whether watching Jack Sparrow strut around is worth your time. He is still amusing.

Kiera Knightly is fine, although after seeing her in a woad bikini in KING ARTHUR she seems overdressed here.

Orlando Bloom has now done two complete trilogies and a few other movies running around with a sword. Oh well, there’s always ELIZABETHTOWN.

Keith Richards, in a nice cameo, plays Jack Sparrow’s pappy.

All three of these movies are about 20 minutes too long.

Something that struck me is, for all the pirates we see (including a conclave of many more pirates), nobody seems to actually ever do any pirating. That is, waylaying innocent ships, stealing their goods, putting the men aboard her to the sword, offering the women a Fate Worse Than Death, selling the children off to be slaves. Our pirates just seem to be sort of like ocean-going Easy Riders, and the East India Trading Company wants to shut them down like the principal after Ferris Bueller. These pirates have no visible means of support!

Posted by Mack Guffin | Filed Under 3 Stars, Action, Comedy, Jeffrey Rush, Johnny Depp, Keith Richards, Kiera Knightly, Orlando Bloom, PG-13, Theatrical