by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
B Rated PG-13 168 min
In this third movie in the Pirates' trilogy, filmmaker Gore Verbinski, along with a team of writers, created a darker vision of the pirate adventures with a complicated plot and more complex intrigue than in the second film. Dark times have befallen the Age of Piracy. Jack Sparrow is dead, but his mates have not given up on him.
The East India Company now controls the pirate empire with Davy Jones a.k.a. Tentacle Face (Bill Nighy) on-the-loose under the worlds' oceans in his ghost ship ready to surface from the briny deep, taking his loot from terrified merchant vessel crews. Elizabeth (Kera Knightley) has joined forces with Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to rescue Captain Jack Sparrow from the land of Davy Jones' Locker using a special map cipher to the realm between life and death.
Problems arise in viewing Verbinski's ambitious filmmaking method when he packed too many characters and special effects into each scene. Yes, it's exciting, but the flow of the story is fractured, making it difficult to follow. Then the paranormal aspects of the story get so out-there, it's easy to get confused and viewers lose the thread of the scenario. However, one must suspend one's disbelief and accept the premise that this pirate empire exists, on different levels of being that is. After death, there are various planes of the afterlife in which pirates and their ilk can get trapped by curses and other supernatural hocus pocus.
As the forces of pirate evil prevail on the seas, Will and Elizabeth are off on a quest to find Jack with the scurvy Captain Barbossa which takes them to Singapore to gather the Nine Lords of the Brethren Court. Of course, one of the Lords, Jack, is in Davy Jones' Locker–a parallel universe, a desert with no water with his ship, The Black Pearl, run aground on sand. Jack is suddenly inside a quantum physics situation, existing in every place at every moment on the ship, simultaneously, with many clones of himself now manning the ship.
Meanwhile Barbossa and his mates are sailing into unknown territory that hopefully will deliver them to Jack's location. Once into the strange world, they go over a waterfall and end up on the shore of Davy Jones' Locker. Stone crabs deliver The Black Pearl to the shore where Jack meets his mates. Of course, Jack is even crazier now, and at first, he can't accept that Barbossa and company are real.
So, how do the rescuers and Jack get out of this strange realm? Ah, the map gives them a clue–"up is down." So they maneuver the ship to capsize and when they do they reverse their polarity and emerge on the other side of the Locker. But are they in the physical universe or in one of several parallel universes? Yeah, it's confusing.
Like in number 2, Verbinski, armed with a bloated budget, again went for overkill. The scenes are overcrowded and the action goes way past its intended effect. The result is a blur on the screen. If Verbinski could shoot a scene with a certain number of stunt men and action, he quadrupled it. No scene could be too overblown for Verbinski's method. And why not, he was spending money like a drunken sailor with no static from the producers, who knew the beast that they created will make a killing on Depp's marquee value alone. Then add that to the fact that the pirate mystique is hotter than Paris Hilton's panties, and bang zoom, they gave Verbinski carte blanch. When the picture goes ballistic, Verbinski will say he should have spent more on everything. But, enough is enough. The movie is a long, loud, action-packed adventure with a muddled script and enough pirate makeup and costumes to make ten more pirate movies. Strangely, I liked it, although I wanted to hate it. I'm a schmuck like everyone else.
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