Overall Rating
  Awesome: 33.08%
Worth A Look: 18.8%
Average: 16.54%
Pretty Bad: 18.05%
Total Crap: 13.53%
7 reviews, 91 user ratings
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| Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End |
by William Goss
"This World Is Not Enough"
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With agendas abound, 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End' completes (for now) the saga of Captain Jack Sparrow and company as they dash back and forth across the high seas in search for booty both on- and off-screen, yet this third installment – or rather, the second half of the first sequel – manages to be sorely lacking in what the title itself inadvertently spells out: A-W-E.Let’s see if I can’t keep this simple: Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) team up with Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to rescue one Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from Davy Jones’ Locker and proceed to summon the pirate lords of the world – including Singapore’s Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat) – in a final stand against the East India Trading Company, whose main man (Tom Hollander) has seen fit to employ Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) in his campaign to rid the seas of pirates once and for all.
Truth be told, there is a bit more business regarding Will’s father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), and the goddess Calypso, but I don’t exactly have nearly three hours to spell everything out. That task is instead charged to the returning likes of director Gore Verbinski, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. However, the ambitions of last summer’s Dead Man’s Chest have returned to haunt them, as so much fuss is made in regard to tying up the byzantine plot laid out by that film that the proceedings suffer from a dire deficit of the sprightly spirit that made the first one such an unexpected pleasure.
While not the sole source of fun and merriment, Depp has undoubtedly been a crucial component to the series’ appeal, and while his re-appearance a half hour in proves aptly surreal, given his purgatory environment, similar manifestations of his own instability only distract as the film goes on. And go on, it does, as Sparrow and others spend an inordinate amount of time yammering on about their corresponding courses of action. Such sequences are akin to observing a particularly flamboyant game of Risk, and while the better portion of the final hour is indeed devoted to a whirlpool-centric climax, the action seems neither worth the wait, nor as impressive as select sequences in Chest that ran under ten minutes instead of over forty.
That in and of itself is the key failing of End: the plot is so aggressively numbing that it anchors down the film, and there never seems to be any wind in its sails to make the proceedings go by with any genuine excitement or ease. The story may be hard to follow, but it’s even harder to care about, and while the action comes in spurts, it’s never nearly enough to distract from the chore at hand. It’s escapist fare that one finds easier to shrug off rather than surrender to, with a plot simply too dense to dismiss.
Otherwise, Verbinski and his crew do keep things in line with its predecessors on an aesthetic level, with the effects still seamless and still best represented by the likes of Nighy’s compassionate Davy Jones. Hans Zimmer returns to provide the score, which finds itself sidetracked early on by somewhat glaring Far Eastern influences and later on by Western cues. As the cryptic Tia Dalma, Naomie Harris keeps up her thick accent and marginal mystique, and as the ever-photogenic couple, Bloom and Knightley remain every bit as adequate as they’ve ever been. Thankfully, it's difficult to object to the return of Rush to the crew, and between him and Nighy’s passion beneath the pixels, the entire ensemble’s game feels raised thanks to them.
One could easily expect fans to easily forgive the narrative disarray, if only to gaze upon Bloom and Depp for hours on end, to see Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards make his long-promised appearance as Sparrow Sr., to chuckle each and every time the camera lands on the monkey (which it does, with disconcerting frequency), and to stay seated through the seemingly endless credits for a bonus scene, as they’ve been groomed to for the past four years.However, for some of us, far too many lines seem far too fitting, easy fuel for embers of cynicism and griping, such as when two pirates assure one another to “take what you can” and “give nothing back”, and especially when the corporate-minded Lord Beckett repeats the maxim, “It’s nothing personal. It’s just good business.” Albeit in an entirely different time, place and capacity, there is one particular pirate who may have already summed up matters best in just five words: “I can’t get no satisfaction.”
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15536&reviewer=409
originally posted: 05/25/07 10:00:00
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USA
24-May-2007 (PG-13)
DVD: 04-Dec-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
24-May-2007
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