The Pirates of the Caribbean: C

The first was something novel - a popcorn-fest that almost seemed to shimmer with drunken wit and action. Audiences everywhere drank deep its particular brand of rougish attitude: "look here!" it said, "we band of anti-heroes and beautiful innocents come to entertain you with our swords and our smarm!". And so entertain they did. Its follow-up aspired as highly as the first and failed, if not for lack of trying; its plot creaked and its characters wore a strange new ill-fitting characteristic - tragedy - and yet the rollicking presence of Johnny Depp & Co. was intact, and so what wasn't to love? And now rolling into theaters everywhere we have this third installment which, if I may speak frankly, stinks.

Go ahead. Hate me. Just be sure to hate me as much as I loathe the creative forces behind Pirtes of the Carribean: At World's End. Surely then the product will be loathed out of existence - the taint it has now spread over the preceeding two films erased.

The reality however is much colder; this third movie, continuing the travails of Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), Will Turner (Orlando Bloom, a man desperately in need of acting classes), and Elizabeth Swan (Kiera Knightley), is such a grandly made bundle of nothing that after having watched it not hours ago, I struggle to remember whole pieces of the 170-minute running time.

On paper though the story seems to make a bold impression: pirates are brought back from death, grand romances are born and crushed, betrayals and retribution abound, and swooping cameras pant at the thought of the over-abounding action. There are plenty of new characters (Chow Yun Fat leaves a particularly nasty taste in my mouth), few of whom are worth noting, and the old bit-players get to experience the joy of watching their on-screen times beefed up to gratuitous levels. What all these extra bodies running around on screen amount to is just that: bodies running around, taking up space, breathing valuble oxygen and ultimately wasting your time and money.

That isn't to say there lacks a certain charm still to the Pirates' Machine - quite the opposite in fact. When Sparrow himself shows up after an endless first act, his daffy hillucinations and quicksilver presence finally give the film its much-needed jolt, and provide the rest of us with crackerjack entertainment. He has always been the vampy soul of these pictures and it is a rare bright spot that Depp can maintain his pin-point lunacy with such rabid glee. Imagine my surprise then to find that not even the Johnny Depp Enchantment can hold back (or rather, hold together) this film. This is mostly due to the fact that the world that Jack inhabits has seemingly devolved into a giant grab-bag of senseless noise.

You see after more than 5 hours of story, the Pirates franchise has shown its true roots: those of a theme park. These roots were once hidden - here by a cohesive-ish plot (Curse of the Black Pearl), there by potent comic energy (Dead Man's Chest) - but now they are exposed, in all of their ugly glory. It is evident in the characters' obstacles, the way that they appear and dissapear like the ups and downs of a roller coaster. And also in the charaters themselves, the sudden and quite pointless metamorphisis of a few key players adds little to the picture but a few tantilizing ideas...few of which pan out. Finally it is evident in the entire effort of the cast & crew. Gore Verbinski is a techincally talented director and he can stage quite beautiful action shots but his penchant for prolonged (and interesting) conflict has weaned after all this time. The writers, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, try to cover this up by creating more and more for our heroes to do but the final effect is the opposite of eating a large, rich feast...the end result is nausea with a touch of gas.

No doubt some will decry me for coming down so heavily on the movie; after all, it is just throw-away art right? Yet how can a person find a movie, no matter how entertaining, of high quality when at its core it is such mind-numbing, tiresome, ceaseless nonsense? At World's End is highly stylized, junky, pop-trash to be sure, and immensely watchable at that, but it has a far darker aspiration: it is, in its crowd-pleasing and completely prepostorous execution, the death of the that rare blockbuster genre created not so long ago by the original Pirates. How I long for those days.