The Afterlife Aquatic

[May 23rd, 2007] It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the Pirates of the Caribbean movies devolved from frisky swashbucklers into a dreary succession of engorged special effects. It is, however, very easy to locate the moment when the franchise dropped off the face of the earth. That would be the 30-minute mark of the latest installment, At World's End, when the ship carrying all the surviving characters literally drops off the face of the earth. The world—much like this movie—turns out to be flat, and down tumble Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightly and Geoffrey Rush over a great waterfall that flows to inky oblivion. Unfortunately, after they die the movie still has two hours and 15 minutes to go.

Our heroes are off to salvage Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from the great beyond, to which he was dispatched via calamari at the end of the second episode. Now, there is a noble practice in the Western canon of retrieving beloved mortals from the afterlife, a tradition that stretches from Orpheus and Eurydice to the Robin Williams vehicle What Dreams May Come. Gore Verbinski's new movie is not a lofty moment in this mythology. Hades here resembles a Saharan production of Being John Malkovich, with Depp issuing orders to a crew of other Depps, before his delusion is interrupted by the arrival of his old cohorts. Maybe this doesn't sound like it makes any sense. It doesn't.

Before attending the press screening of At World's End, I was greeted by an unprecedented stern warning to "not reveal the many plot resolutions that occur throughout the film." I am more than happy to comply, because while I have a hazy idea of what happens to the characters in this movie, I have no idea how it happens and even less understanding of why. And after enduring nearly three hours of clamorous mayhem, I no longer care. By the midway point of the movie, no protagonist remains who has not been killed at least once, and the same goes for most of the villains. This means most of them are immortal but some of them are not, in the same arbitrary way that they all can defy the laws of gravity whenever the CGI calls for it. There are no physical stunts in this movie because there are no physical laws—or metaphysical ones, for that matter.

The vacuum is taking its toll on Johnny Depp. The charm of the Pirates franchise—the only reason it was ever worth caring about at all—was Depp's boozy, offhand performance, which legitimized the first film and nearly saved the second by striking a deal with the audience: If we didn't take any of this nonsense seriously, he wouldn't either. But Depp is offscreen for most of this chapter, and when he does drop in he betrays exhaustion, as if even being above it all were turning out to be too much effort. Surrounded by the rising tide of a unintelligible plot and a hurricane of visual detritus, he comes to the only reasonable conclusion: to hell with it.