AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS6/10 4 years ago
[5.8/10] In the climax of *Pirates at the Caribbean: At World’s End*, a maelstrom erupts. Ships swirl around one another in the massive vortex. Indistinct combinations of pirates, British soldiers, and assorted mermen leap from one ship to another and cross swords. The combination of rain and cannonfire and whirling destruction makes it nigh-impossible to distinguish friend from foe or hold your bearings amid the supernatural skirmish.
It is an exhausting set piece: cacophonous, muddy, and endlessly busy without ever really finding a clear throughline for the action. Instead, it becomes a torrent of undifferentiated gray goop, flying across the screen with little point or purpose. That is, sadly, a microcosm of the movie itself.
*At World’s End* does contain good stories and good ideas. Jack Sparrow having a taste of the afterlife and wanting to avoid a repeat engagement at all costs is a good motivation. Will Turner being forced to test his loyalty to his fiancee against his loyalty to his father is a good moral dilemma. Elizabeth Swan seeking revenge for her father’s murder is a good driving impulse. Commodore Norrington trying to earn his redemption after his earlier betrayal is a good character beat. Davy Jones and Calypso as supernatural jilted lovers is a good concept. The fall of piracy and rise of commerce on the open seas is a good animating theme for the picture.
But by god, you just cannot do them all at once or, at the very least, you cannot do them all justice, even in the span of a bloated, nearly three-hour movie. Despite that overextended runtime, and all of that ground to cover, *At World’s End* still can’t justify its length. For a movie where there is constantly something happening, usually something that’s theoretically important, it is a remarkably boring film.
That’s largely because with so many plots and schemes and shifting alliances, the film still lacks the time or the real estate to really explore any of those ideas in depth, let alone find inventive ways to blend them with one another. Everything has to be done in shorthand. Major plot developments happen in a few quick scenes before it's onto the next thing, leaving each event feeling weightless. There’s plenty of incidents in the movie -- it hardly takes a moment to catch a breath -- but each feels more airy and threadbare than the last.
The one saving grace in the thing is Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbosa. Liberated from the burden of having to play the villain, he’s free to chew scenery with abandon. As a comic side character an ally, Barbosa is just too much fun, leaning into the pirate speak and faux-grandiosity with aplomb and livening every scene he occupies.
Were that the same could be said for Jack Sparrow. If you thought the character was overexposed after the last movie, just wait until there’s literally a dozen of him on screen at the same time. Depp’s tic-filled performance was a breath of fresh air when the first movie came out, but here he’s a reminder that not all side dishes should be the main course. There’s something to the idea of him being extra mad after his stop in Davy Jones’s Locker, and his anxiety-ridden quest for immortality has some juice, but after nearly eight hours of movie, his act soon starts to grow tiresome.
That’s almost impressive in a movie with far too many characters for any one to really command the screen or the script. Beckett is nominally the film’s big bad and gets an implausible but artsy demise, but it doesn’t mean anything since all he’s done for two movies is spout villain clichés rather than become a full-fledged character. Calypso and Davy Jones’s romance is one of the few compelling romantic angles in these films, but it ends with minimal closure as the former essentially just disappears and the latter dies after about a half-second of crying over her precipitation. Even Will is sidelined for much of the picture, more passenger than driver in the third chapter of what was once a trilogy.
Maybe there would be more time for trifling things like character development if there weren’t so much damn plot and additional lore. While there’s something to be said for engaging in some additional worldbuilding for the age of pirates, halfway through movie #3 is a little late in the day for a historical exposition dump. Who’s secretly in league with whom, and who’s working on a hidden agenda, and who’s about to dramatically change sides leaves the narrative here even more convoluted than the one in *Dead Man’s Chest*, robbing the story of any force and smothering the movie’s charms in byzantine plot.
Some of this might be more tolerable if the damn thing were just more fun. But no, this is Serious Business:tm: now and must be treated as the epic it’s intended to be. Every once in a while, the irreverence and swashbuckling joie de vivre of the original peaks through (see: the mid-fight marriage), but this is largely a slog. Even the action set pieces, a highlight in *Curse of the Black Pearl*, are overblown and less-engaging this time around, as the combination of familiarity and overreliance on the usual CGI hodgepodge renders most of the big moments all but inert.
That absolutely extends to the film’s climactic final fight, where every major character is scrambled together in a wash of cutlasses and cannonballs. It’s nigh-impossible to follow the action from moment-to-moment, trace cause and effect, or maintain that type of energy for a half-hour of indiscriminate explosions.
But by god, *At World’s End* tries, not just in that overdone closing battle, but in the movie as a whole, which succumbs to the same problems on a larger scale. If it could be broken into its constituent parts and provide each with enough time and space to be developed, there’s at least three or four solid flicks that could be wrung from all Gore Verbinski try to pack in here. Instead, we get an ungainly film that loads far too much onto what was once a sleek, zippy ship, until it can do nothing else but sink.
