Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Hollywood needs to figure out the difference between sequels and trilogies. The first X-Men was a great stand-alone film, and then X2 was an even better sequel. But then the folks over at Fox decided to pretend that they were making a trilogy all along, and we were given the trigger-happy, under-thought X-Men: The Last Stand.

The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, meanwhile, has behaved a lot like the Matrix franchise. After the surprise success of the first film, the studio greenlit two back-to-back follow-ups in order to shape the entire series into a trilogy saga. When that happened with The Matrix, we got a Part Two that piled on confusion and cliff-hangers, and a Part Three that managed to be even more confusing while it tried desperately to untangle its inherited mess of plot strands. Unfortunately, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End suffers the same curse.

The good news is that despite the alarming similarities between the two franchises, the Pirates sequels are better than The Matrix sequels. In Dead Man’s Chest, the humor went a long way toward balancing out the CGI effects and the tricky plot. At World’s End isn’t as funny, but the effects are still top-notch, the characters are still endearing, and we do get some sense of closure.

If you were slightly confused by the plot of Dead Man’s Chest, or even if you weren’t, expect the first hour or so of At World’s End to have you very lost. Seemingly every single character with a speaking role has a hidden agenda, and they all try to make secret deals with each other, and most of those deals end in someone backstabbing someone else for some very, very obscure reason.

But let’s try to navigate our way through it: the story picks up in Singapore, of all places, where the suddenly-alive-again-with-little-explanation Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) meet Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat) to try to persuade him to come to a secret pirate meeting with all the Pirate Lords. Or maybe they need help from his men to go rescue Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from Davy Jones’ Locker, which is pretty much Hell, at least the kind of hell where Jack hangs out in a completely white landscape with rocks that turn into crabs and a dozen or so doppelgangers of himself that are figments of his imagination. I would say the sequence there is the strangest thing I’ve