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PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END
Arriving less than a year after the record-breaking Dead Man's Chest, this third installment of Disney's blockbuster adventure series offers more of the same --
double-crossing characters, elaborate state-of-the-art visual effects, general busyness, and plenty of idiosyncrasies. The feeling of "been there, done that" is amplified all the more by this sequel's bloated runtime, which is just a shade under 3 hours.
Things open in Singapore, where resurrected Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), and their nigh-untrackable lot of oddball pirates turn to Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat) for help in locating Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), last seen being devoured by legendary sea monster the Kraken. The efforts of Barbossa and company, soon joined by Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), to rescue Captain Jack are instantly complicated by murky motives and the arrival of the East India Trading Company, headed by boring antagonist Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander).
The journey to Davy Jones' Locker proves moderately compelling, though what awaits there raises the franchise to new heights of silliness. Johnny Depp turns in a mere caricature of his earlier performances, this time sharing the screen with countless clones of himself à la Michael Keaton in Multiplicity. Between this over-employed device and the central practice of bringing dead characters back to life, the word "uninspired" inevitably comes to mind.
What ensues next incorporates all parties, including: the squid-like Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), who is given a romantic back-story as his heart literally continues to pass hands in a locked chest; Will's father Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), who with the passage of time is losing his memory and physically becoming part of Jones' hellish Flying Dutchman ship; and Elizabeth's near-fiancé James Norrington (Jack Davenport), a morally ambiguous figure made extraneous by the years' various cast expansions.
Slow-paced and not very lively, it's rather disappointing to see the once-fresh Pirates franchise hobble to its (likely momentary) conclusion. For a movie so long in development that's spending so many millions of dollars on production and promotion, it's amazing that all of the people involved couldn't see where they went wrong here and corrected themselves. There is no change of personnel to cite; blame therefore must go to producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Gore Verbinski, and writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who all, perhaps understandably, have developed this universe, to massively positive public approval, into something so big and lucrative that they can't possibly see it out in a coherent, satisfactory fashion.
At World's End feels closer to its immediate predecessor than The Curse of the Black Pearl, the original, subtitled-at-the-last-moment film that was embraced beyond all expectations in the summer of 2003.
That's somewhat attributable to the fact that World's End was written and partially shot at the same time as Dead Man's Chest. While able to stand on its own, World's End builds upon elements introduced in the second film and places a fair value on its humor abilities, with extremely calculated comic relief gags divided among animals (the Capuchin monkey Jack and Cotton's unnamed Macaw parrot) and misfits (the goofy duo of Pintel and Ragetti played by Lee Arenberg and Mackenzie Crook, Martin Klebba's vertically-challenged Marty) alike.
The worst way in which World's End is similar to Dead Man's, however, is in its manufactured nature. The movie seems consciously designed to ensure repeat theater trips to pick up on everything in play. At any given point during the film, one is apt to ask "What the heck is going on exactly?" and get nowhere. "Who's betraying who?" The real question is "Why should we care?" The Bruckheimer style of moviemaking -- where only the rare shot can last more than four seconds -- collides with Elliott and Rossio's script, yielding something replete with both plot particulars and vagaries.
The Cast Of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Labels: Movie Madness
