No sooner have Disney’s accountants finished totting up the treasure trove brought in by the second Pirates of the Caribbean film last summer than the series’s third and, we’re told, final part arrives. I’m not a fan of the franchise – I find its style graceless and annoyingly synthetic – but devotees should enjoy this new instalment. Some of its sequences impressed even this sceptic, and it’s certainly better than the last one, Dead Man’s Chest.

That movie rambled on, but still got no further than “To be continued”. At World’s End is long-winded, too, but at least you get a sense that things are building towards a proper finale. But first, Johnny Depp’s mercurial Jack Sparrow has to be rescued from Davy Jones’s locker. This turns out to be an otherworldly desert in which Jack has become even madder than usual. He hallucinates countless doppelgängers of himself, all competing for the one bit of food they have left: a peanut. Set against a white backdrop, this scene provides a welcome break from the cluttered, barnacle-encrusted look of the previous films. It also lets Depp play around with the Jack Sparrow persona, renewing the appeal of a character who had become monotonous.

After Jack has been found by the other main characters – Orlando Bloom’s Will, Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth and Captain Barbossa, played by Geoffrey Rush – there comes another ingenious sequence, in which the team figure out how to get back to the real world. They capsize their ship at a moment when the pull of gravity is altered, and the water in which they are submerged falls away to become a new sea beneath them. This is presented with flair by the director, Gore Verbinski, and it’s a shame he doesn’t give us a few more flights of fancy with the same freshness and clarity. Instead, the film returns to the usual routine – hectic action amid CGI seascapes – and the weak-nesses that were there in the other movies come to the fore again.

As in Dead Man’s Chest, we have to endure storytelling in which new revelations crash over us like waves in a storm. Suddenly, we learn that all pirates are governed by a nine-person committee of top-ranking buccaneers – a skull-and-crossbones security council. And Jack, whom we had thought an outsider, is one of those nine. He certainly kept that under his headscarf. Apparently, the council’s first act, many years ago, was to imprison the goddess Calypso in mortal form. So we discover there are deities in this saga’s world. Calypso is the one in charge of the sea (tough luck, Poseidon), and it turns out she and Davy Jones (who, you will recall, is a squid-faced fellow with Bill Nighy’s voice) share a history that would fill several logbooks.

BACKGROUND

• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

• Pirates III: Bye-bye, captain

• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

• I want to quit acting, says Keira Knightley

• Bill Nighy talks Pirates

BACKGROUND

• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

• Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl

Last blast for Orlando the sea dog

‘No more trilogies!’ Orlando Bloom tells us, on the eve of the final Pirates of the Caribbean

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Of course, a trilogy of fantasy movies has to keep unveiling more information about its cosmos, but this film does so in messy fits and starts, and always through hurried dialogue. Commenting on Jack’s gift for landing on his feet, one observer says: “Do you think he plans it all out, or just makes it up as he goes along?” You get the impression that the film’s writers, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, are using the latter approach.

The other big flaw that hasn’t gone away is the blandness of Will and Elizabeth. The script is partly to blame, but Knightley’s thin voice continues to let her down, and Bloom has never needed the seven seas to make him wet. In this chapter, he’s supposed to be mean and tormented, but he just looks as if somebody has snatched his Nintendo and won’t give it back. I realise that these two have been cast with a preteen audience in mind, but the same priority didn’t keep Star Wars from working up a bit of heat between Princess Leia and Han Solo.

Still, those young viewers don’t seem to be complaining, probably because what they most want from these films is humour and action – and in this respect, At World’s End does its stuff with as much brio as the series has ever had. The most notable joke, though, happens to be strictly for older viewers: the long-awaited cameo by Keith Richards, acknowledged by Depp as the inspiration for Jack’s hazy louche-ness. He’s not given a brilliant part, but it’s fun to see him in pirate gear, receiving due reverence. As for the action, it’s mainly concentrated in a long climactic battle. This is another wild, confusing CGI overload, but there are plenty of eye-catching images, such as Davy Jones and Jack duelling atop a mast.

In a perfect world, this film wouldn’t be as successful at the box office as it is sure to be. But it’s good enough for that success to be something you can live with.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

12A, 168 mins

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