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If the prior year’s Dead Man’s Chest was a rollercoaster that consistently threatened to careen wildly off the tracks at any moment, then At World’s End is a whirligig on a crumbling foundation. The sense of bloat that’s always threatened to devour these films reaches its apex here, with nearly three hours of convoluted plotting, unnecessary side-plots, and lore that spirals out quick enough to meet the demands of the plot.
Once more, I don’t hate this entry in the Pirates franchise, but with (broken) promise that this would end the series, it seemed a fitting enough ending. Will and Elizabeth grew over the course of the series, their plots get a pleasing conclusion, Jack’s sense of self-preservation warred with his better impulses, and Barbossa chewed scenery throughout. Keith Richards cameos as Jack’s father, an assembly of pirate leaders provides many uniquely colorful and distinct characters, and there’s enough spectacle for several films to be found here.
It’s just incoherent and needlessly complicated. It’s easy to forget that this was once based on a theme park attraction! Granted, The Curse of the Black Pearl used up a majority of the most famous sights and sounds of the ride so they had to branch out. I said most, At World’s End includes audio lifted directly from the original ride. Just in time for these back-to-back sequels, Disney completely renovated the ride to include Jack, Davy Jones, Barbossa, and the cursed Aztec gold in a bit of corporate synergy. If that isn’t a perfect metaphor for the presence of these sequels, I don’t know what else is.
Does the plot really matter? No, it hasn’t in any of these up to this point, and this one is overstuffed to the max. There’s Chow Yun-Fat as a pirate lord of Singapore, and completely underutilized, and Davy Jones and Tia Dalma’s past is revealed while simultaneously shuffling them off to the side to focus on…. well, it’s hard to say. There’s the East Indian Trading Company, led by Tom Hollander’s sneer and glower, there’s the gathering of pirate lords, there’s Davy Jones and Tia Dalma, there’s our two love birds, there’s Barbossa, and they each double-cross each other then go back again. Then they switch sides once more, before switching back, and are you confused yet? Good. You should be.
None of it makes any sense, and good luck trying to keep all of the players and their motivations square. I gave up a long time ago and just sat back to watch the visual splendor of it all. And there is a ton of it to be found. While the franchise may have squandered much of the good will from the first film by this point, director Gore Verbinski still gave you plenty of reason to keep your eyes on the screen with his imaginative and distinct images. A pirate ship sailing across a still sea with the stars reflected upon the surface, given the distinct impression of them sailing through space, has enough poetry in it to keep your interest.
The thing that’s so damned frustrating about these sequels is how they drop in a series of smart ideas and characters with potential, then squander it all with stupid choices. Elizabeth Swann’s transformations from society ingénue to pirate king (yes, king) is far more interesting than Will Turner and his daddy issues, but guess who gets the lion’s share of the screen time? Then there’s Davy Jones, so major a role in Dead Man’s Chest, stuck playing supporting player to far less interesting characters, while Tia Dalma and Commodore Norrington barely register in this bloated epic at all. Meanwhile, Jonathan Pryce’s Governor Swann has spent the entirety of this trilogy as background decoration and little else.
The darkness that threatened to overtake Dead Man’s Chest swallows up At World’s End, quite literally in the climactic battle between all three major parties across two boats locked together over a whirlpool. Or the opening, which finds pirates (or those accused of piracy, or those found guilty of aiding piracy, including a young child) being led to their death, by hanging no less, and defiantly singing a sea shanty while waiting for the bottom to drop. It is in these moments that the film’s muchness becomes a serious case of too much of a good thing. I respect the titanic ambitions and originality of visual splendor in these films, even their sense of fun, but my god, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Then they made a fourth film.
