It takes an age before Johnny Depp shows his face in "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," and when he does, it's the tip of his nose that looms into screen left, eventually succeeded by a flaring nostril.
The entire franchise seems on the verge of collapse, propelled to construct ever more grandiose flights of fancy. Without those sequences, there would be nothing there -- but a movie cannot exist on rollick alone (not by the second sequel anyway).
The problem is not so much that the energy -- or the invention -- flags. But the audience may. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have been working overtime. Having fabricated an entire supernatural pirate mythology from odds and ends (a theme park here, a Flying Dutchman there), they now feel duty-bound to lay it all out for us as they go.
"World's End" features so many detailed negotiations between charlatans with obscure cross-purposes you head for the exit more confused than when you went in.
Still, it's all as splashy as $250 million can buy, and on occasion the CGI guys conjure something akin to poetry: for example, a sampan gliding through a vast arctic cave, then emerging like a spaceship into an inky black sea reflecting the stars above ("You have to be lost to find a place that's never been found," rationalizes Capt. Barbossa, once again played by Geoffrey Rush).
Or the Black Pearl surfing through the sand on the back of a million crustaceans. Or the climactic sea battle on the cusp of an oceanic whirlpool. Or its wonderful character creations, notably Davy Jones himself (again by the terrific Bill Nighy).
.It's really too bad this wonderful anarchy is swamped by the movie's noisy inconsequence. Fully an hour too long -- 2 3/4 hours! -- and emotionally frigid, "Pirates" is scuppered by nothing so much as its own inflated self-importance.
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