Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End Reviews
Top Critic
Mind-bogglingly, there's virtually no swordplay for the first two hours; when Keith Richards shows up for his soused cameo, the visual joke hangs in the air.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/6
Advice to Johnny Depp fans: enjoy a seafood dinner, skip the beginning, and roll up after half an hour. You won't have missed a thing.
The entire franchise seems on the verge of collapse, propelled to construct ever more grandiose flights of fancy. Without those sequences, there would be nothing there -- but a movie cannot exist on rollick alone.
The plot is not only hard to follow, there seems to be nothing real at stake. Half the characters are already dead, and half the movie seems to involve swordfights with dead people who can't be killed with swords.
Not so much thought out as strung together -- colorful incident upon colorful incident, but without logic, gathering suspense or any attempt to establish emotional connections between audience and actors.
Depp descends into the shallows of self-parody, and the plot, keen to tie up every narrative loose end, manages to be simultaneously expansive and incomprehensible.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Unconscionably long at 2 hours and 48 minutes, saddled with a plot that badly needed streamlining and running a bit low on humor, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End may not sink, but it certainly sometimes founders.
| Original Score: C+
Worth seeing for the jaw-dropping action, the doses of irreverent humor and of course the star power of Depp, Knightley, Rush, Orlando Bloom, Bill Nighy, Chow Yun-Fat and a host of other talented actors who utter their lines with Shakespearean gusto.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A glazed, inhuman, cluttered piece of work, a storytelling mishmash that buries the considerable charms of its actors under heavy drifts of silt.
A ponderous pirate saga, 168 minutes long, with more doldrums than 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'
The longest and talkiest installment in the blockbuster Pirates trilogy, At World's End doesn't even have the decency to provide a good action sequence until more than two hours in.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Adrift in the windless seas of its 168-minute running time, the viewer passes through confusion and boredom into a state of Buddhist passivity.
In order to tie up all the loose plot lines from the first two films, Verbinski and screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio throw so much story at us that the nonstop action becomes deadening.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Funner, biggerer, brighterer, bolderer, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is not only okay, it may even be close to good.
One longs for more scenes featuring Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and less of everything else in this bloated, overwrought and convoluted three-hour misfire.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Relentlessly dense and unfathomable; Depp, the heart and soul of the series, doesn't even show up till several reels in.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
This film is less comedic and more sweeping than the first two, and Depp often seems to be strolling the borders of the film, commenting on it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
[Erupts] into a grand and glorious adventure at the final hour. After lying dead in the water during much of its three-part odyssey, Pirates of the Caribbean has saved the best for last. The third time is the charmer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
In terms of pure adventure, there's less of it here than in Pirates 2 -- the action doesn't really start until about two hours in, and even then it's hard to understand the shifting allegiances or make sense of why the different sides are fighting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Ultimately the voyage is so choppy and long that into the third hour I found myself yawning, 'Yo-ho-hum and a very sore bum.'
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Even longer and less coherent [than Dead Man's Chest]. Consider it a companion piece to the similarly indulgent Spider-Man 3.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5
A thrill-a-minute extravaganza.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The third Pirates has tender moments and smashing ones, and if you fix on Depp, you'll manage fine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Running nearly three hours in length, it continues the pointless excesses of the second film while again entirely missing the romantic charm of the first.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
I like my action movies complicated, but At World's End is less a complexity than it is a high seas bazaar with everyone and everything vying for attention. You end up going home with nothing to show for your adventure.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The overloaded sequel exhausts without ever satisfying. Cluttered and clattering, busy with jokes that never bob to the surface of funny, it puts the 'oy!' in ships ahoy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
At World's End has some fun stuff. If only it weren't so stuffed to the gills with moving parts.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
[Depp's] shtick is funny, but the players are all upstaged by the astonishing special effects, superior to those of earlier installments in creating a wondrous and menacing world.
One of the best wrap-ups of a trilogy in recent memory.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
At World's End includes a whole lot of chitchat, as the characters strain to explain this overplotted extravaganza. Sure, the pirates need reasons to swing swords at each other, but do they really need this many?
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Abandon hope all ye seeking a coherent, much less satisfying, narrative.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
If the previous installment, Dead Man's Chest, was a classic No. 2, antic and insultingly unresolved, World's End tips the ship too far in the opposite direction. The first two hours of this 168-minute leviathan are bafflingly action-free.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The cannibals, coconuts and landlocked locations [of Dead Man's Chest] have been replaced by the high-seas high jinks that made the first film so enjoyable.
| Original Score: 3.5/5
The effects are spectacular, Knightley and Bloom have more to chew on and more romance to play, and Depp, vamping multiple versions of the ditz he created for this role, is uproarious.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
It won't matter whether you've seen the first two Pirates movies or not. You'll still be confused.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
For the diligent and the faithful, director Gore Verbinski and screenwriters Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, laboring under the bombastic tutelage of Jerry Bruckheimer, have assembled another collection of exciting set-pieces with bellowed dialogue.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The most visually spectacular, action-packed and surreal of the adventures of Capt. Jack Sparrow.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
After the film's final act at Shipwreck Cove, one does feel a sense of satisfaction with the Pirates series, the glow of a rum punch and an ocean sunset.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer does deserve a shoutout: It takes a kind of genius to sucker audiences into repeatedly buying the same party tricks.
| Original Score: 2/4
The thrilling final hour is almost enough to make one forget how much of a labor it is to trudge through the first two-thirds -- almost, but not quite.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
More than ever, Depp masterfully keeps the enterprise afloat, even when the sheer weight of all those other characters threatens to throw it off-course.
Just about every character in At World's End comes with his or her own agenda, and the movie grows top-heavy as we attempt to keep track of who's trying to accomplish what.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
POTC: At World's End clocks in at more than 2 3/4 hours, but, unlike last year's bloated sequel, at least possesses some semblance of a destination, making it slightly more coherent -- if no less numbing during the protracted finale.
POTC:AWE is a lukewarm maelstrom of secret agendas, double crossings, tricky alliances, back stabbings, political conspiracies, warring factions, etc. -- none of which is the least bit captivating or, by and large, comprehensible.
