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Saturday, November 21, 2009
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After slow start, Pirates rebounds with thrills
Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's end
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
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The first two Pirates movies, which plundered more than a billion and a half dollars at the worldwide box office, have earned such good will that fans of the series likely won’t mind the hour or so that crawls forth before "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End" finally gets fun.
For non-fanatics, the film’s verbose scenes in a steamy pirate lair in Singapore and a miserable voyage through frigid waters during which an unfortunate pirate grasps his frozen big toe and breaks it off, may be an endurance test.
Neither of the aforementioned sequences is as lacking in entertainment, though, as Capt. Jack Sparrow trapped in a hallucinogenic purgatory called Davy Jones’ Locker.
Depp’s beloved Capt. Jack doesn’t show up until well into the film, late enough to make one suspect he’s lost at sea. Once Jack does arrive, it’s tempting to wonder if he was worth the wait. Condemned to Davy Jones’ Locker, poor old Jack is marooned in living death, high and dry with his ship on a barren landscape. His exile is both unsettling and dull.
With Jack at his wits’ end, "At World’s End" looks like a sinking disaster. But having hit bottom with Jack in Davy Jones’ Locker, the film has no place to go but up. It rebounds from a long, introductory dirge, even though weak jokes, melodrama and foggy storytelling continue.
Once Jack is rescued by Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and his former enemy, Capt. Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), plus more familiar faces, "At World’s End" finds its high-spirited sea legs again. Jack reclaims his sense of fun and there’s plenty of thrilling, elaborately choreographed swashbuckling to go around. The much-talked-about cameo appearance of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards — upon whom Depp based his character — as Jack’s pirate dad, is wryly fun, too.
As for the plot of "At World’s End" and the conflicting goals of the film’s principal characters, a map would help. And the seemingly endless orgy of bargaining between thwarted lovers Will and Elizabeth, the nine pirate lords of the Brethren Court (including Jack and Barbossa), ruthless Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) and tentacled Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) is epic unto itself.
Though the film is slow in delivering its goods, "At World’s End" does deliver the mad fun and rousing action that fans expect. Following an incredible, special-effects-charged grand finale, there’s also more than a hint that "At World’s End" is not the end of this phenomenally successful series.
