Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is chalked full; full of action, full of sub-plots, full of mistakes and full of fun. It reminds me a little of when I was 12 years old and ate an entire chocolate bunny. I didn’t regret how yummy and delicious it was, but the stomach ache didn’t feel so good.
After promising his father he would save him from servitude to Davey Jones, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) sets forth a plan to save him. At the same time the council of pirate lords needs to convene to save pirates from extermination. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), sentenced to suffer in Davey Jones’ locker, is one of the pirate lords and therefore must be saved so the pirate council can be called. There is much back stabbing, personal motivations and tons of attempted plot twists.
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End has an endless number of betrayals. There are several negotiation scenes, especially at the beginning of the movie, which are confusing, and who is doing what to whom is unclear. The negotiation scenes are convoluted and I could smell the gears in my head starting to smoke as they continued on. The confusing nature of the bargaining left me wondering who I should be rooting for in the movie.
There is a great amount of computer effects in the movie and often the effects are wonderfully believable. Davey Jones’s face, with the exception of his eyes, is completely computer generated. It is hard to make a mystical creature seem realistic but the animators made the kraken face not only believable, but magical.
Even though some of the effects are wonderful there is a great deal of problems, as well. In many of the scenes the real characters are surrounded by computer generated characters. I haven’t seen effects of this quality since the Brownies in Willow. It is a big part of the movie and they should have spent a little more time and money to make the extra characters look better and more believable.
The actors in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End didn’t shame themselves, but they didn’t make it into LaRae’s Book of Fantastic Acting, either. Often, the writing makes the scenes downright trite, and the acting is the only thing that saves it from being monstrously stupid. The acting, equally, can make a well written scene of eye rolling quality.
Johnny Depp perfectly revives Jack Sparrow. The always nearly-drunken state Sparrow wanders around in as he spouts wild wit walks the fence between brilliance and clown school. In At Worlds End, Depp often falls on both sides of the fence and sometimes both at once. Many of the scenes he is in feel like set ups for dumb jokes, and if those jokes are good enough one time, they are good enough twice (a problem throughout the movie.) Depp has a hard time pulling off the second joke as easily as he did the first, or giving it that something special that makes it rise above the first gag.
The secondary characters have a lot more face time in At World’s End and they make great use of it. They may be what lengthens the movie, but I laughed more at them than I did at the main characters.
By far, the best character in the movie is Jack. Not Sparrow, Monkey. Jack the Monkey may have been a cheap gag, and I don’t care. He is adorable and every scene he is in made me laugh. There is a scene where he is sitting next to two of the secondary characters and I couldn’t see them because I was so focused on how cute he was.
For all of its faults, the end of the movie finally gets to what we really wanted to see, swashbuckling goodness. There are sword fights, cannon fights, and banter. What is a pirate movie without explosions and stabbings, really? Finally, the betrayals are explained, characters make choices, and lives are changed. It almost makes the rest of the movie worth seeing, almost.
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is way too long, has way too many subplots and there weren’t enough laughs or action to make it a must see but the problems don’t make it a must miss.
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