New Review! PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END (2007, dir. Gore Verbinski)

Alright. This movie is really long. I think it might be longer than Goodfellas. And when your major set piece is a beard of tentacles or a ship that sails under water, I'm not so sure you can justify being longer than Goodfellas. The team behind the first two Pirates films decide to veer off into full-on fan fiction for the third installment. There's a lot of information spun at a not-so-rapid speed and the visuals are all surprisingly Gilliam. Not that its surprising they went Gilliam (complete with a bewildered Jonathan "I Was in Brazil" Pryce) but that it took them two movies to get there.

There is absolutely no way you will be able to make heads or tails of what looks like 30 plot lines unless you've seen the first two films at least as many times as I have (Pearl: 7, Chest: 4... and that's not counting DVD viewings). It's bizarre that Verbinski et. al. went this direction with the series. I felt for sure (or should I say feared) that Pirates would simply succumb to laziness due to the massive amounts of money being thrown that them once the first succeeded. At World's End will probably be accused of many things. Laziness is not one of them.

Convoluted definitely is. The runtime is a little silly unless you're a rabid fan like myself. Everyone is connected to each other and needs equal screen to plead their case for your attention. New mythology is introduced left and right. Minor characters from the earlier installments are shoved to the foreground. There are practically no action sequences. The spectacle instead consists of shot composition that looks like conceptual art. Including a wayward nose, a topsy-turvy ship, a skyscraper-sized woman and the flag of the East India Trading Company engulfing a dead body... UNDER WATER. Johnny Depp (many of him, actually) seems to be having another blast but is inexplicably sidelined. To make room for who? They two most boring faces in American cinema working today: Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom. Very stupid to drop the flirtation between Depp and Knightley.

When my best friend* Carmen and I left the theater, she said "That was a three hour pitch meeting that I had to pay for!" And she and I loved the first two. I didn't hate it. I was just felt like it was fan fiction. Which kind of endeared it to me but also made it very hard to sit through. I really love these stories and these character even the boring ones. Geoffery Rush made me giggle frequently. I have to say that I thought Bill Nighy was incredible considering that he was covered up in so much CGI. I thought his scene with Naomie Harris was really awesome actually. They produce the kind of sparks that could have lit the whole movie aflame. If it weren't such a soggy overachieving mess.

Bottom Line: I loathe to say it but this one's for superfans only. No one else will be able to stand the run time or the criss-crossing backstories. I enjoyed myself but that's because I'm crazy.

*when I'm not throwing up on her or accusing her of sleeping with my loser boyfriend.