After the opening weekend of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest pulled in roughly enough money to finance an NBA team for a year, there was almost no point in arguing that it was vastly inferior to the first installment. After the enticing ending to the three-hour Dead Man’s Chest, though, there was almost no question that any fan of the first movie would invest another three to learn what happens to our heroes in At World’s End. And while a return to the jargoned fun of the first film makes the third entertaining, it’s still too punctured by its own plot contrivances to stay afloat very long.

As this third trip to the Caribbean begins, the East India Trade Company is angling to dominate the sea and, led by Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander), are executing anyone who has even dreamed about being a pirate. To cull active piracy, Beckett has teamed with Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), the piscine miscreant last seen collecting on Jack Sparrow’s blood debt. In the meantime, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), Elizabeth Swan (Keira Knightley) and the freshly reanimated Barbosa (Geoffrey Rush) go to Singapore in search of a map to Davy Jones’ locker, where they can bring Sparrow (Johnny Depp) back from the dead. The excursion to the Far East leads them to Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat), a pirate lord who takes a shine to Elizabeth and will become part of a plan to bring all the pirates of the world together to rise up against the man.

This major plot is enough to hold the movie together, but the writing team, with Gore Verbinski and Jerry Bruckheimer looking for ways to stretch the running time to epic and the explosions to blockbuster-level, wraps more stories into the plot, including Will and Elizabeth’s continuing romance and Tia Dalma’s (Naomie Harris) rise from voodoo witch to sea goddess. The first is useless to continue, because their chemistry was decent enough the first time around to convince viewers that they belong together and because the fleeting flirtation between Elizabeth and Jack in the second film was so thoroughly unconvincing that a redemption arc was barely worth it. The second, meanwhile, is a useless waste of time.

The final hour of At World’s End provides all the swashbuckling comedy and adventure that made Curse of the Black Pearl such an unexpected hit. During the rest of the movie, the principal players have their moments, namely Rush, whose intonations were sorely missed in part deux. For his part, Depp brings Sparrow back to some sort of comedic relevance, trading barbs with clones of himself and doing his best Keith Richards impersonation, matched only by…Keith Richards, who cameos as Jack’s dad.

As the end of a trilogy (though not the end of the series, one would think by the massive amounts of cash the films continue to gather), At World’s End serves its purpose, wrapping up character arcs and reminding us what got us interested in the concept to begin with. Sadly, it suffers under the need to carry all the dead weight of Dead Man’s Chest and introduce some of its own.

Rating: * * * of 5

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