On Film: Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End

Directed by Gore Verbinski

Starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keith Richards, Keira Knightley

Everybody's back, Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, Orlando Bloom as Will Turner and Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swan, those three alone probably account for thirty or forty percent of the audience, Geoffrey Rush as Barbossa and the rest of the crew of the Black Pearl are also present and accounted for. In the opposing corner Jack Davenport is back as Norrington, Bill Nighy again supplies the voice for Davy Jones and Tom Hollander personifies the East India Tea Company as the smug Lord Cutler Beckett.

The Movie

The movie starts out with a mass hanging, which may be a first for a feel good summer action movie. The East India Company is coming down hard on pirates and any anybody that has anything to do with pirates. As an aside, The East India Company makes a great villain. It's one of the first modern corporations. It was a monopoly. It doesn't exist anymore.  Everybody is pretty much ignorant, including me, on what exactly the East India Company did, although you get the vague feeling it had something to do with oppressing someone.  You can make up anything you want to about them and it will seem plausible. They had their own private army and navy; sure they had assets to protect. They sentenced

people to death and carried out the executions; well, they were a monopoly. They were in league with demons; all in a days work. The East India Company is so ruthless in their persecution of pirates that the call has gone out for a meeting of the nine Pirate Lords. Small problem, Jack Sparrow who is stuck in Davy Jones locker, a nautical purgatory, is one of the Pirate Lords and for some reason I don't remember a meeting

of just eight Pirate Lords will not accomplish anything. So Elizabeth, Will and Barbossa, in their own special way, go to request charts and a ship from Sao Feng, played by Chow-Yun Fat, the Pirate Lord of Singapore, which may have just edged out Mos Eisley in the "wretched hive of scum and villainy" department. The East India Company crashes the party and in the chaos Barbossa, Will, Elizabeth and the rest of the crew of the Black Pearl end up with a ship and charts to take them to

Davy Jones locker. As you may imagine Davy Jones locker is not an address that you can just pull up on your TomTom, but after some crafty navigation our merry band end up in Davy Jones locker just in time for Jack to end up rescuing them.

At this point, I could claim that I won't go into further plot details for fear of revealing to much of the story, but truthfully it all gets a little fuzzy for me at this point, though it all made perfect sense at the time. While I'm on the subject of sense, without a healthy suspension of disbelief this movie would make very little, thankfully my suspension of disbelief is full of vim and vigor. Some may even go so far as to call me gullible, just so you know. I will say that you can be confident that there are numerous twists and betrayals large and small and a giant climatic battle at the end followed by a heartwarming

denouement, but I could have told you that with reasonable confidence before I even saw the movie.

This third Pirates movie is a lot of fun, but it's absolutely gorgeous as well, and I'm not just talking about Keira Knightley. Mixed in with

all of the swashbuckling and gags are some scenes of great beauty. I think I even gasped a few times at what I was seeing on the screen. It was those moments that I remembered that this is a movie based on a Disney amusement park ride and I don't mean that in a bad way. The costuming and set dressing were extremely inventive as well. In nearly

every scene my eye was wondering around trying to take everything in. In the meeting of the Pirate Lords there were so many cool little details I didn't know where to look.

The acting was what it needed to be. It wasn't award winning, unless the Academy created a new category for Sheer Smarm, in that case I would nominate Tom Hollander. There was a lot of scene chewing, but for this type of movie, it was appropriate. The minor characters were a lot of fun

and several of the gags from earlier movies were carried through.  I was especially happy about the fate of two particular characters. Towards the end, I got the felling that the writers were tidying up, resolving all of the little background stories. I loved the way the writers bookended the ending. I kind of got the feeling that this was the end, though they could keep the story going. A lot of franchises have continued on a lot less. I enjoyed the first one, never saw the second one, loved this one, I would definitely pay nine bucks to see another one.

If you're a fan of summer blockbusters this is a great one, you'll regret it if you don't go see it. If your sense of disbelief has atrophied and lost all feeling, I would just stay home. If you do go see it, don't be an idiot like I was and leave before the credits are over or you'll miss the extra scene. Oh well, just an excuse to buy the DVD when it comes out.

8/10

Mike Young