But that doesn't stop Capt. Barbossa, Will and Elizabeth from wanting
to somehow rescue him. So they acquire fabled Chinese sea charts, pull
together a motley crew and sail to the end of the world to find their
slurring and swaggering friend in his own private hell, stranded
aboard the Black Pearl in the middle of a dead desert.
Through a miraculous event, Jack makes his way to his saviors and together they discover how to break free from death's grasp. They sail back to the living where Barbossa calls together the Brethren Court of pirates. He hopes to convince these bloodthirsty leaders to band together and battle Davy Jones, Lord Beckett and the armada of the East India Trading Company.
But all is not as it seems when Will deceives Jack and Jack deceives Barbossa and Elizabeth deceives Will ... and on and on it goes. Lies set a number of people's plans in motion. But the worst of these is Lord Beckett's. He hopes to send Jack back into Davy Jones' barnacle-encrusted embrace and violently wipe the pirate nation from the face of the earth.
Jack gives up what matters most to him to save Will's life. Elizabeth and Will eventually voice their love and commitment to each other. Elizabeth and her father share a deep love and respect for each other. And her transformation from damsel into fiery leader is now complete, sending a message of empowerment to young women.
When Elizabeth and Will's father ("Bootstrap" Bill Turner) speak of Will's
promise to return and rescue dear old Dad, Bootstrap realizes, "If
he saves me, he loses you" and selflessly says, "Tell him to stay
away." Undaunted, Will still strives to uphold his promise.
A man of questionable loyalties makes a final redemptive stand. The pirates have a slightly twisted but noble saying of, "No cause is lost if there is but one fool left to fight for it." During a brief cameo as Jack's buccaneer dad, Keith Richards advises him, "The trick isn't living forever; it's living with yourself forever."
Pirate superstitions both abound and are realized just as they were
in The Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man's Chest. Sacred pirate
law books. Cursed ships. Davy Jones. The undead. The not-quite-dead.
And the voodoo charmer Tia Dalma, who this time around is tied more
directly into a legend about a goddess of death named Calypso. She
casts bones in a time of trial and is the focus of an incantation that
liberates Calypso from her human prison.
Jack is in a place "off the edge of the map" where only the dead can go. His rescuers sail over a waterfall, apparently dying themselves, to reach him before beating the system and re-entering our dimension. A supernatural phenomenon then turns the world upside down and brings them back. An occult curse gives a dying man life and damns him for eternity.
Will and Elizabeth kiss several times. And after they're wed in a
scene some will interpret as a morbidly romantic encounter between
the living and the dead it's implied that they have sex on an island
beach.
No surprises, but the violence does move up a smidgeon from movies 1 and 2. Sword fights. Impalings. Gun blasts. Explosions. They're all commonplace. Ships are ripped asunder, sending bodies and tons of splintery shrapnel flying. More up-close violent moments include a man being choked as Davy Jones' tentacles work their way into his head and body through his mouth and nose. Two women are shot at close range, one in the forehead. A beating heart is stabbed. A heavy cannon crushes a man, and a corpse turns up with a stake jammed through its mouth and out the top of its head. A half-man, half-eel creature bites down on a man's head. Dead men are tied to floating barrels.
The action starts with hundreds of pirate sympathizers being lined
up and systematically hanged (then tossed into piles). The nooses are
placed around their necks before the camera shifts to show their feet
dangling through open trapdoors. (A young boy is among their number.)
A man is shown with a large, raw-looking scar on his chest. Another's frostbitten toe breaks off in his hand. As Jack and Co. attempt to escape the land of death, they see hundreds of deceased souls floating just beneath the water's surface.
The British profanity "bloody" is uttered frequently and combined with "h---." Many of the pirates' growled interjections are indecipherable. (Think variations on the classic "arrrgh!")
As would be expected, rum is the swill of choice for many pirates (including Jack on several occasions). It's tossed back either from a cup or straight out of the bottle.
Everyone lies to everyone else. And they all attempt to justify their actions.
In the first two movies, one notes how "cool" they made pirates seem. Nothing's changed between then and now. Not even the pirate's creed. Jack and the first mate recite, "Take what you can. Give nothing back."
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is one whiz-bang of an action flick. There's no denying that. The wind is howling and the sails are at full mast. It's obvious that the film's creators wanted nothing more than to top everything they've done up till now. In fact, they want this film to have more heroes, more villains and a bigger, splashier pirate sea battle than ever a bunch of landlubbing moviegoers saw before.
But as it's said onscreen, "There's a cost for what we want most." To set up all those special effects, the story gets pulverized and we lose track of who the good guys are if we ever knew to begin with.
