World's End or Just End of the Line? (Movie only) (Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End (DVD))

Member Name: marandina

Product:	Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End (DVD)
Date:	01/06/07 (331 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Better than the second movie

Disadvantages: Too long

There’s something reliable about sequels of sequels in that you almost know what to expect these days. The formula goes like this: great original followed by rehash of original followed by throw everything in to third movie and see if the kitchen sink survives. With worldwide ticket sales over the $1.7Billion mark now, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has been a staggering financial success even if, artistically, it’s lurched from the sublime to the ridiculous in the blink of an Elliott/Rossio screenplay eye. With the original movie - “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” - being released in 2003 followed by Dead Man’s Chest in 2006, the final movie of the trilogy was shot back to back with the second film and the word on the street is that the POTC dynasty is set to run and run with POTC4 already under consideration and the main star, Johnny Depp, happy to continue playing his Jack Sparrow character in the future. Great news or at world’s end depending on your viewpoint.

Cap’n Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is in the land of the dead i.e. at the bottom of Davy Jones’ locker having been eaten by the Kracken at the of the second installment. Determined to get him back, his faithful crew have enlisted the help of Cap’n Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) on the say so of the mystical, Cajun sorceress Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris). In an attempt to steal the map that plots the course to the end of the world and to Davy Jones’ locker and beyond, Barbossa takes his merry band to Singapore in an attempt to wrestle the map from Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat). As Barbossa makes off with the map, Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) and his East India Trading Company are planning the ultimate downfall of the pirate fraternity en masse, using the ghostly and apparently impregnable ship, “The Flying Dutchman” and its terrifying captain, the squid faced Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) to remove any obstacles in their way. With the Barbossa-led searching pirates (literally) falling off a waterfall at the end of the world (in reality, Niagara Falls incidentally) in their attempt to rescue Jack and the net closing on the Pirate Lords and their respective pieces of eight, will Sparrow make it back from the land of the dead and will Cutler finally rid the world of every pirate on the planet?

In the grand scheme of things (and they are confusingly grand in this climatic movie), the third movie is better than the awful second movie but not a pirate patch on the original. Then again, how often is that the case with movie dynasties like this and the pattern for the POTC sequence is very similar to the path roamed by The Matrix trilogy. The first movie was fantastically original even with its derivative roots from all of those avast-me-hearties outings in the days of Errol Flynn and the like. Where the movie falls down is in its mind numbingly, confusing plots and subterfuge that completely bamboozled my kids and many of the adults in the audience. You can almost image Jerry Bruckheimer encouraging the screen writers to throw in more twists and turns, almost like the Pirate Ship ride mimicked in one of the set pieces in the movie. For the most part, the audience will show a glimpse of vague recognition followed by a smile to acknowledge the clever links with the theme park ride origins of the Disney production and then settle back to let the overly complex motives and machinations of the characters throw them back, forward and around like a roller coaster ride in downtown Orlando.

Perhaps it was too much to expect the cast to sparkle as in the original and Depp’s camp swagger and comic timing fails to save the lead from the "familiarity breeds contempt" category, what with all that grinning and constant tomfoolery. With the added irony of a cameo from Keith Richards as Jack Sparrow’s father (Depp based his character on the aging rock star), at one stage we reach an indecipherable part of the movie featuring pirate codes, ad hoc rules and a Richards looking nearly as monstrously bizarre as the shrunken head he’s holding that’s meant to be his wife. Orlando Bloom as Will Turner looks like he’s finally given up trying to work out whether he’s supposed to be a hero or villain (of course, we know all along which he’ll turn out to be) and Keira Knightly as Elizabeth Swann finally gets reduced to the damsel-in-distress bit part that we knew should would end up as in the unwritten world of movies, the male hero always, always saves the day.

Still, it’s not all bad news and I did say that it was better than the second movie. Gore Verbinski returns to direct yet again, comfortable in his sweeping style, occasionally employing slow motion shots to add effect and achieving striking results through a combination of models and the customary CGI at times. The scenes in the desert with a stranded Black Pearl are wonderfully hallucinogenic and the battle scenes at sea reasonably convincing. The arrival of Calypso, the all consuming goddess of the Sea, is impressively shot even if the sub plot that we’ve spent so long building up to seems to end in a cul-de-sac. The musical score from Hans Zimmer captures the pirate theme throughout, even throwing in an homage to Ennio Marricone at one stage with a spaghetti western musical passage to accompany a showdown scene involving the main characters on a thin strip of beach. The glamorous locations are as easy on the eye as ever, shot mainly in the Bahamas and Dominica although Ship Wreck Cove does look like one theme park, product placement too many even if it is strikingly eye-catching.

With a run time of 168 minutes and certificate 12A, the final POTC is, yet again, too long but then I’m exhausted from making the same observation over and over again by now. There is action and adventure aplenty and nearly everyone that’s seen the first two movies will almost certainly go out and see the final installment. My kids enjoyed it (despite the baffling plot/s) and the audience in general seemed engaged throughout. A tip is to stay to the end of the closing credits as there is a visual footnote that you may want to catch to round off the movie and the story in its apparent entirety. You can’t help but know that this is not the end of the line for the resurrection of the pirate genre and that the movie’s producers will want to wring every last cent out of the enduring popularity of the POTC phenomenon. With Disney looking for a kickback for its theme park chain as well, ready yourself for more adventures on the High Seas assuming that you can cope with more rum swigging, Jolly Roger hoisting, yo-ho-ho-hoing to the tune of a dead man’s song.

Thanks for reading

Mara

POTC3 is on general release world wide.

More info at:disney.go.com/disneypictures/pirates/atworldsen d/

Summary: Overview of POTC3