Pirates of Caribbean At World's End

Plot Summary
After Elizabeth (Keira Knightly), Will (Orlando Bloom), and Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) rescue Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from the the land of the dead, they must face their foes, Davey Jones (Bill Nighy) and Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander). Beckett, now with control of Jones' heart, forms a dark alliance with him in order to rule the seas and wipe out the last of the Pirates. Now, Jack, Barbossa, Will, Elizabeth, Tia Delma, and crew must call the Pirate Lords from the four corners of the globe, including the infamous Sao Feng (Chow-Yun Fat), to gathering. The Pirate Lords want to release the goddess Calypso, Davey Jones's damned lover, from the trap they sent her to out of fear, in which the Pirate Lords must combine the 9 pieces that bound her by ritual to undo it and release her in hopes that she will help them fight. With this, all pirates will stand together and will make their final stand for freedom against Beckett, Jones, Norrington, the Flying Dutchman, and the entire East India Trading Company.
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A ship worth taking
Lawrence Toppman

I won't be able to talk anybody into or out of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" experience now, so I'll simply offer sage advice: Hit the bathroom just before it starts.

To miss any five-minute chunk of this densely plotted trilogy-capper will leave you confused. You could step out as the massive climactic battle begins - after all, it goes on for almost half an hour - but you'd come back to wonder why the ships Black Pearl and Flying Dutchman were locked in combat on the edge of a whirlpool. (Though I sat through the film without a break, and I'm not sure I could give all the details.)

The tale begins with the hanging of a child (among a hundred other pirates and sympathizers) and ends, if you sit through the endless roll of final credits, with an actor who looks just like that child setting up a cliffhanger that points to a fourth installment.

In between come two-and-three-quarter hours of betrayals, murders, derring-do, love lost and found and a story that almost justifies the length. It wraps up a dozen loose story threads that won't make any sense if you skipped "Dead Man's Chest." "At World's End" doesn't have the freshness of the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" (how could it?), but it's more entertaining than the muddled middle of the trilogy. It rounds off the narrative in a satisfying way that eluded "Shrek" and "Spider-Man." Maybe that's because writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who worked on the first "Shrek" and all the "Pirates" movies, quit that series and stuck with this one.

The opening half-hour is especially novel, as we never see fey Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) plans to convene the nine pirate lords from around the globe; Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander), who has declared martial law in the Caribbean, plans to use Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and his immortal Flying Dutchman to wipe all pirates off the seas. The plot eventually involves the sea goddess Calypso, who has been confined in the body of sorceress Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris); side-changing by lovers Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley); the machinations of Chinese pirate Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat); a past love affair between Calypso and Jones, which inspired the latter to cut out his heart and keep it in a box; and the salvation of Bootstrap Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgard), who's serving a 100-year sentence aboard the Dutchman. And yes, sepulchral-voiced Keith Richards has one scene as a pirate historian and Jack's father.

The filmmakers occasionally forget to make sense of details. Jones has to obey the hated Beckett because the latter obtains possession of his heart. But when Jones gets his heart back again, he continues to serve this creep.

Director Gore Verbinski sets up a massive conflict between the nine pirate ships and the vast British armada commanded by Beckett. But when the fighting starts, they all sit around doing nothing, while the Dutchman and Pearl slug things out. (When the battle is over, the pirate lords start cheering wildly, as if they'd just accomplished something.)

Yet this is the first "Pirates" picture with emotional weight. You feel for Elizabeth as she's permanently separated from her governor father, and for Davy Jones and Tia Dalma/Calypso as Fate pulls them apart. We don't feel anything for Jack, of course, because he's a self-serving trickster; in fact, I wondered how he ever pulled a crew together that didn't mutiny in 20 minutes.

In the end, the filmmakers lacked the daring to kill off anyone who might be needed for "Pirates of the Caribbean Meet the Love Boat," or whatever the fourth film will be called. They protected the franchise rather than projecting a vision. But that's what blockbuster series do, and this one has raised the bar for the summer of 2007.
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Another critic
Reviewed by Scott Tobias

The Marx brothers classic Duck Soup contains a bit that applies nicely to the bellicose Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy, which reaches its conclusion with the nearly three-hour At World's End. When presented with a treasury report, Groucho's Rufus T. Firefly, the newly appointed President of Freedonia, declares it so simple that even a 4-year-old child could understand it. "Now run out and find me a 4-year-old child," he says. "I can't make head or tail of it." As a consequence of trying to turn a theme-park ride into a 463-minute trilogy, the Pirates movies are freighted by so much convoluted mythology and supernatural hoo-hah that perhaps only the very young can understand their dream logic. The last, longest, and most tedious of the bunch, At World's End sags under reams of exposition that not only fail to clarify the story, but take away from the slapstick tomfoolery that made the first film (and a couple of sequences in the second) escapist fun.

Picking up where the second entry, Dead Man's Chest, left off, the new film finds bland heroes Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley teaming up with the once-dastardly Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to find Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, who's trapped in Davy Jones' locker. Here's where things get confusing: Bloom and the gang must first go through Singapore to get a special navigational map from Chinese pirate Chow Yun-Fat, who's one of several pirate lords who must unite in order to secure pirate freedom in the Seven Seas. (There's also some business about a "Brethren Of The Coast," and the "nine pieces of eight," but let's not get ahead of ourselves.) Meanwhile, the East India Trading Company has possession of Davy Jones' beating heart and has brought Jones and his Flying Dutchman ship into its quest to eradicate pirate-kind. And then there's Sparrow, whose predicament has left him with several metaphysical manifestations.

The Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy—and At World's End especially—stands as a lesson in the perils in blockbuster filmmaking: What started out as a fleet one-off swashbuckler with novel supernatural elements has become loaded and graceless, with each new entry barreling across the goal line like William "The Refrigerator" Perry. The franchise's two chief assets—the surprise of Depp's swishy pirate and Gore Verbinski's dexterity at directing slapstick action sequences—have been eclipsed by expository scenes that confuse even more deeply in their attempt to clear things up. Should the franchise warrant still another sequel, the dialogue might as well be in Esperanto.