Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World’s End

I didn’t really expect to like PotCIII. The first one was a great introduction to some classic characters, but the second was deeply flawed, lacking focus or any real sense of purpose and being too quick to produce bizarre new plot elements, and since the two sequels were filmed at the same time, I expected a similar sense of dissatisfaction. But I was pleasantly surprised by how consistently entertaining and even daring At World’s End was. The fact that Keira Knightley is the finest lily of all the emaciated gardens of Hollywood doesn’t hurt either.

Picking up where the second film left off, Elizabeth Swan and Will Turner have teamed up with old antagonist Captain Barbosa and the mysterious voodoo woman to rescue Jack Sparrow from Davy Jones’ locker. Davy Jones himself, meanwhile, has teamed up with the wicked and pompous English navy-types, who intend to crush the pirates once and for all. If there’s a weak point in the film, it’s that the real stakes never seem material enough to work – we get the impression that if our heroes lose, the pirates will be exterminated, but the threat never seems really palpable, nor, despite a stark opening scene, do the bad guys seem to have the means to actually do it, but in the end, when cannons are firing at one another from across a maelstrom and principal characters are fighting on the mainmast, such details don’t seem really important. There’s enough plot to hang the scenes off, and that works here. The whole section with Chow Yun Fat seems like a means to an end, an artificial little add-on that stems from a want to include oriental aesthetics rather than any real necessity of plot. A better central story may have made for a better film and a bigger payoff at the end, but what we did get was in no way unsatisfactory.

This franchise is about spectacle, after all. There may be some macabre moments, but mostly everything’s light and superficial, and if ghost pirates were hard to take seriously in the first film, fish-men in the second and third are harder still. There are plenty of comic relief characters and funny animals, and of course that classic performance from Johnny Depp, this film benefiting from a fun little cameo from Keith Richards, the man on whom Depp based his addlebrained, swaggering character. For my money, though, the most entertaining player was Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbosa; he may not have the sex appeal or silliness of Sparrow, but seeing a great actor like Rush doing his arrrr-that-it-be pirate voice and gurning furiously, yet carrying real gravitas when it was required, meant that he stole the show. He was a better baddie than Bill Nighy ever could be with his prosthetics and silly Scottish accent, but as an ally and rival for Sparrow, he easily steals the show. Johnny Depp, meanwhile, gets some very interesting hallucinogenic/schizophrenic scenes that through their length, striking imagery and bizarreness feel very out-of-place in a Hollywood blockbuster, and which I’m sure some audiences will find baffling, but I loved. It felt just a little bit edgy and absurdist, yet because they were in Jack’s head, worked fine. On the other hand, when the humour became absurdist and two soldiers guarding Davy Jones’ chest get distracted by their own pythonesque argument, it seemed incongruous and didn’t work – there needs to be a sense of realism even amongst ghost monkeys and shark-men for believability to be maintained.

That’s not to say limits of plausibility cannot be stretched. There’re some great exaggerated moments, like when we first glimpse a pirate stronghold and discover that it is entirely made out of shipwrecked vessels, piled up high into the sky, and it looks like something out of One Piece. When the council of Pirate Lords meet, they’re all so strikingly impressive to look out that it makes you smile, even if none of them really do anything. Everything looks fantastical, from the impeccable costumes to the perfectly-realised sets, and the whole thing just looks like it was superb fun to make.

I feared for the franchise after the second film, but was satisfied by the second film. Will there be a fourth? Well, it’s not impossible, that’s for sure. In fact, it’s probably already in the works.

Left the cinema buzzing with silly pirate stories of my own I’d love to tell.