'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End'

BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

5:17 PM EDT, May 23, 2007

Heads up! A basketball analogy is coming your way from left field -- or, more appropriate for our topic, the port bow.

If you paid any attention to the recently completed semifinal round of the National Basketball Association playoffs, you'll long remember how hard Phoenix Suns guard Steve Nash was physically hammered in a gallant, but losing cause. To enhance the point, the cameras would show close-ups of his many bruises. Ugly.

And, what, you may ask, does this have to do with "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"? Simply stated, this third installment of the hugely successful spin-off of the Disney World attraction will leave your senses feeling like Nash's body at the end of that six-game Suns-Spurs series: Beat-up and bruised from cheap shots, coming from all sides.

I know what you're thinking: Why am I wasting your time bringing playoff basketball into this? What you really want to know is ... well, what happens next? How does Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) escape that giant sea monster that swallowed him at the end of last year's second installment, "Dead Man's Chest"? Will Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) and Will (Orlando Bloom) ever trust each other again? And whose side is Barbosa (Geoffrey Rush), Jack's formerly dead rival for the helm of the Black Pearl, really on this time?

Some of these questions can be answered without giving away too much; others can't. But even if I wanted to spoil things, I couldn't. This movie is too darned hard to follow. There's so much stuff happening, sometimes all at once, that it's hard to keep track of who's on whose ship, who's selling out whom and even who's getting killed, where and how. And it won't matter whether you've seen the first two "Pirates" movies or not. You'll still be confused.

At one point, everybody aboard the Black Pearl runs from one side of the ship to the other. Why? To make it capsize. Why? Again, even if I were allowed to tell you, I'm not sure I could.

The imperative here seems to be to keep things moving, whatever the cost to common sense. And move it does from the back alleys of Singapore back to the British colonial outposts where the cold-blooded, sweet-toothed Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) conducts a vendetta against all pirates and their fellow travelers with the not-quite-explicable aid of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy). And Elizabeth, who does more actual swashbuckling here than any of the guys, gets moved around a lot. She's at one point handed off to Chinese buccaneer Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat) whose own troops seem more loyal to Barbosa than to anyone else. Or are they? After a while, so much stuff blows up (did I mention producer Jerry Bruckheimer's name yet?) that you're expected to ignore the gaping plot holes left after the smoke clears.

"At World's End" only gets interesting when it slows down or stops altogether. At such times, Depp is given plenty of space to show off his comedic resources -- and deservedly so, since he remains the chief attraction. Everybody in the cast is generously offered a boffo moment or two since there's enough chewable scenery here to feed a small country.

It won't surprise you to learn that the ending leaves open the possibility for further misadventures on the high seas. One hopes those involved can catch their breath before setting out again -- or at least let us catch ours.

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