Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

Directed by Gore Verbinski

No matter how many people bow down before Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, it’s still an insult. Disney capitalizes on the success of the first two Pirates movies by repeating them to excess: Drunken, boozy Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) prances amidst subordinate pirates, amphibious humanoids and upper-class British lovers (Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley). Noisy fighting between naval tyrants and creatures from the occult has the aimlessness of something being made up as it goes along, yet lacks the pleasurable invention and levity of improvisation. Its nearly three-hour overkill represents the dullest commercial calculation.

Jerry Bruckheimer hasn’t produced a movie this undignified since Pearl Harbor—that cornucopia of corn and bombast, where he ransacked history and sullied patriotism. His bigger-is-better notion of filmmaking confuses overload with substance. At World’s End has similar chattering characters parading through huge, seemingly endless set-pieces. The viewing experience is as mechanical as clock-watching. Viewers who convince themselves this is fun suffer the same delusion as Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski: they forgot what fun is. 

At World’s End is a post-Peter Jackson swashbuckler-epic, done without humor or style. The one attempt at style—Sparrow’s entrance one-fifth into the story—goes from an f/x hallucination of schizophrenia to a surrealist image of white stone crabs evolving into a desert that depicts Sparrow’s delirium. This combo Herzog-Dali-Matrix vision is just a stunt that Verbinski never connects to the rest of the franchise (just as Depp’s third go at gay pirate Sparrow shows no more sexuality than Franklin Pangborn). At World’s End’s serious length is out of proportion to the ratio of escapist intent, its pace doesn’t convey whimsy and each lumbering action sequence is poorly composed (even a naughty between-the-legs shot of a pirate dangling a chain of fusillade balls is off-balance).

Definition of banality: Verbinski’s shot of a ship moving across a desert. It isn’t a new image. Verbinski copped it from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But in that movie, the unexpected apparition worked reflexively, as homage to a head-spinning moment in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Spielberg and Lean envisioned natural phenomena meeting the miracle of man-made ingenuity. For Verbinski, the image is just a lame imitation of big-screen spectacle. The illusion is spoiled when a character exclaims “Impossible!” We all should yell: Unacceptable.