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Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: May 26, 2007

The armada of summer sequels sails onward this weekend with the new Pirates of the Caribbean film. This one is suffixed At World’s End, and it’s long, long, long… so long, it ought to count as two sequels. Before I fillet this movie, I will sincerely hand it to the screenwriters for delivering a plot. The double dealings and triple crossings do keep the brain busy, even as the senses steadily fatigue from over-stimulation. But a plot is all this film delivers, and even fans of this inexplicably popular franchise may find the proceedings a bummer, as most of what elevated the first two episodes is, dare I say it, cast away.

At World’s End stars… Geoffrey Rush. And it stars… Tom Hollander. It also stars… Keira Knightly, and her enchanting exquisite predatory underbite. And it stars Orlando Bloom, and by the way, is there a less charismatic extremely handsome man in all of film history than Orlando Bloom? Even Stellan Skarsgård, as Orlando’s barnacle-and-starfish-encrusted ghost-dad, exudes more screen magnetism. Hollywood keeps trying to make a star out of Orlando Bloom, but there’s nothing there, folks. Just move on. Hire Paul Giamatti next time. Sparks will fly.

Anyway, who else is in this movie? Oh yes, Johnny Depp, for about 55 minutes of screen time, which is about a third of the film’s entire, interminable duration. What a waste of a beloved commodity. Johnny Depp’s freaky performance made the first film somewhat accidentally exceptional. His Captain Jack Sparrow was Andy Kaufman-esque, both hilarious and misanthropically weird. In the second film he remained aloof, sly, drunk, and cowardly throughout, and made his presence felt despite getting gradually overshadowed by Bill Nighy as the squid-faced Davy Jones, and by the giant sea-beast Kraken, which really was a cool sight.

This time around, Depp’s performance is tangential, and when he is present, he’s mostly watching the plot go by all around him. He still generates a large chunk of the movie’s total quality quotient, but there is just not enough Depp to offset the fundamental mediocrity onscreen. Meanwhile, there is way too much time devoted to the story’s countless grubby-faced supporting clowns. The appeal of Jack Sparrow’s crew, it seems to me, has been grossly overestimated throughout the entire series.

Bill Nighy is back also, and again spirited and inspired behind all those squirming special effects. But like Depp, Nighy, too, plays second or third fiddle behind characters that, let’s face it, don’t put butts in theater seats. Furthermore, his pet Kraken is dead by default this time, and nothing nearly as breathtaking is around to take its place.

What, you may ask, goes on in this film, while Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones mostly lurk around on the sidelines? Frankly, nothing too memorable. There is pervasive voodoo, and a good deal of the un-dead seafaring is slow and glum. When things pick up, there are bodies and splinters flying everywhere—probably upwards of 400 slayings by cannon, musket or sword—and as with the preceding films, the battle scenes are loud, bland, and positively endless. Also, there are countless, persistent, intimate close-ups of unclean hair, teeth, and skin, because apparently this visual esthetic cannot be over-fetishized in an eight-hour trilogy. And there are the numerous back-stabbings, manipulations, hidden agendas, and so forth, which, I admit, do hold the interest, if only on a clinical level. And there you have it—an afternoon at the movies.

Folks, a spectacle is just annoying without creativity behind it. This trilogy has enjoyed its assets, like Johnny Depp’s far out acting, or the octopus-faced Davy Jones. But too much of this Pirates trilogy is mere ordinariness with the decibels cranked. The sound effects and visual effects are expensive and omnipresent, but rarely clever. The score is as loud an absence as I have ever heard. And the swashbuckling is never worth one frame of a good George Lucas light-saber duel. Meanwhile, the more essential elements, like plot and dialogue, are frequently pretty juicy, but repeatedly overmatched by the filmmakers’ insistence on distracting us from them. “Settle down,” I wanted to say, to the screen. “Just be funny and cool.” But from the beginning, this series has mistrusted its own potential, and never more so than in this third installment. And like any feat of overcompensation, it’s kind of a shame to behold.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld