Riverview Theater 8/9/2007 Score: 3

When I finished watching Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, I was really mad. I thought it was such a cheat to have so many story arcs open when the movie ended. It was obviously leading into the third movie, but I still thought it was cheating the viewer out of a good movie. There were not enough arcs closed in the second part. Unfortunately, the third installment was a huge let down.

The same old cast of characters is back in what is thankfully the last in the Caribbean trilogy. Unfortunately, the first half hour of the movie is focused on just reintroducing all the situations that the characters were in at the end of the last movie. Jack Sparrow is dead, and he needs to be rescued. Somehow the Black Pearl is in the other world as well, but it’s stuck on an island. The rest of the crew procures a vessel from a random “master of the sea”, and they head off to get him. The way there is peppered with some interesting one liners.

After they get to the land of the dead, they need to use a random map in order to get back, and of course Jack figures it out the riddle, right after they see it. Crazyness ensues and they return to the land of the living. The rest of the plot revolves around getting together captains from around the world in order to complete a random strange quest that Barbossa decided they needed to be on.

I had some high hopes for the plot when they introduced a goddess and played up the story. Unfortunately the huge buildup is just playing with you - it has no resolution, which doesn’t make any sense because it was the main goal of the entire first half of the movie. The second half is just a ride that you need to watch yourself through. Flashy fight here, one-liner joke there. The special effects are played up far too much, and the acting just gets worse and worse as the movie gets closer to the end.

At least this movie closes all of the story arcs that were opened by the second part of the trilogy. It at least counts as a guilty pleasure. The small in-jokes are littered throughout the movie and give you a chuckle or a groan every couple of minutes, even when the special effects budget is showing. It doesn’t make up for the not-so-great acting and completely predictable ending to many of the stories, and the complete lack of resolution of the most interesting story line that fizzles out and the completely boring last half hour that made me happy when I was at this movie’s end. It gets a 3.