Movie Review - Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End is the final installment of the successful Pirates franchise, which was apparently all based on a amusement park ride. I really liked Pirates 1, but the two following movies have proven a big disappointment. The first Pirates movie was clever, funny, different and had a good story. All aspects of it was good and it has an ending already. The fact that the movie made money and they decided to cash in on it just ruined the name.

I forgave the second movie since I thought that it was setting up for the third movie. So I sat through the second movie and took in all the crazy storylines. The humour was predictable and the special effects were not amazing anymore. I had seen all of it in the first Pirates movie. Will and Elizabeth were already together and now they needed a story to push them apart again. Depp's great portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow was brilliant in the first film. But now every nuance of Jack's character was just repeatitive without good dialogue and story to help take the character further.

The third movie literally takes off where the second movie left. Everyone is searching for something that all involves the chest with Davey Jones' heart. Will needs it to save his father, Elizabeth needs it to save her father and Will. Jack needs it to save himself. Captain Barbossa needs it to save himself, and Calypso needs it to save herself. Captain Beckett needs it so that he can control the seas and make the East India Trading company stronger. At least that's what I think everyone needs it for. The plot is a tad confusing, with the writers trying to weave so many stories together and including all these double dealings between everyone.

The story went along very slowly in my opinion, despite all the effects and attempts to build drama. I didn't even know who and what cause I should be supporting. The supposed bad guys in Beckett and Davey Jones didn't seem that bad. As if it wasn't bad enough to have so many characters already, we now had even more pirates in the form of Chow Yun Fat's Sao Feng. It's just all a mess.

In the end, I don't know if there was a happy ending or not. The empire and Beckett were destroyed, Calypso got free, Barbossa stayed alive, Jack is alive, Will is alive of sorts and Elizabeth is living on some island? I don't know what happened. It's just all so silly and pointless it seems.

The battle scene between the Black Pearl and the empires ship was pretty good but since I hadn't fully involved myself emotional, it wasn't great. Battle scenes work when the viewer has investment emotional attachment to one side, like the battles in the other great proper trilogies of Lord of the Rings, Matrix and Star Wars.

My final opinion is that everyone will probably watch Pirates 3 just to see the ending and be able to talk to their friends about it. However, the greedy producers should have just left a good thing as it was and finished the Pirates films after the first one.

Overall Rating: **1/2 Effects are good but story is confusing and quite dull.