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Review

After two box-office triumphs, Johnny Depp is back as Captain Jack Sparrow in the third (and last?) of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, setting sail once more – even a little thing like his death in the second film not stopping him. With this third film, Depp brings back his on-target, bravura portrayal of the fey-ish, not-so-cutthroat captain, and director Gore Verbinksi provides more amazing set pieces, effects and atmosphere that distinguished his first two films. So maybe that’s some of the problem with this admittedly enjoyable, overlong film: it’s just so much more of the same.

Filmed at the same time as the second Pirates film, the continuity is flawless – no one from actors to director to technicians have missed a beat. (It’s all up there on the screen: state-of-the-art special effects, jaw-dropping art design and costumes, another terrific score, great interplay between the cast.) No one, that is, except the writers, who have concocted such a convoluted good time that in addition to the pirates the audience needs a map just to keep track of what’s happening on screen.

The story begins with on-again, off-again couple Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) teaming up with resurrected Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) in Singapore. In between fights with the locals and soldiers under the command of the villainous Lord Beckett of the East India Trading Co., they attempt to travel to the other world, Davy Jones Locker, to rescue Sparrow from the dead and return him to the land of the living so he can occupy the last seat of the pirate equivalent to the round table.

This chapter of the film is the most inventive, with the crew falling over a waterfall into the land of the dead and finding a nearly half-mad Sparrow (though how could you really tell?) hallucinating Captain Jack Sparrows everywhere (in a blatant rip-off of Depp’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s great Oompa-Loompas). Then they must figure out how to return from the underworld, which is one of the film’s best scenes. (The best scene in the film, which has to do with Lord Beckett and a slow-motion stroll across his ship, is miraculous in both its cinematic invention and execution.)

Their return to the land of the living, however, is beset with double-crosses that are impossible to keep track of, battles at sea which are difficult to determine who’s done what to whom, and prolonged scenes of Will and Elizabeth sparring – get it over with already.

But the film undeniably comes alive whenever Depp is on screen. Though the writers haven’t given him quite the sharp tongue and hilarious one-liners that were on display in the first (and let’s call it, the best) film, the actor never ceases to amaze as he relishes in his dainty debauchery of dastardly delights, creating after three films one of the most endearing screen characters in years.

It’s akin to the old saying that you’d pay to watch your favorite star read a phone book. Well, P.O.T.C.: At World’s End is almost like that. It seems to go on forever (168 minutes… what were they thinking?), it all becomes repetitive after awhile, but, oh, how it’s read.

 -- David Bleiler