12A, 168mins

Just how many Jack Sparrows can one person take? This seems to be the most pressing question that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End asks of the luckless viewer. For here, in the movie’s most emblematic scene, a mere 35 minutes into a harrowingly long 168-minute screen experience, we are reintroduced to the franchise mascot, the loveable cockerney seadog Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Only this time, because of plot points too vague to comprehend, the movie presents us with not one, but 20, even 30 identical Captain Jacks, all of whom are played by a strangely dead-eyed Depp, all of whom galumph about blankly on the poop deck of the beached Black Pearl frigate, and all of whom are grating testaments to corporate entertainment’s unfathomable ability to transform creative originality into anodyne excess.

Indeed, to anyone who’s seen other so-called “three-quels” such as X-Men 3, Spider-Man 3 or The Matrix Revolutions, there’s something depressingly familiar about the bloated overkill that defines every aspect of At World’s End. It’s as if the director Gore Verbinski and the writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio wilfully and brutally crashed Pirates 1 and Pirates 2 together and simply left the resulting incoherent bricolage on screen and called it Pirates 3. Thus we are duly treated to an increasingly crowded roll-call return of practically every previous Pirates character, including the salty Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), the slithery Captain Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and the effete Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport), as well as our trusty central threesome – straight-faced Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), squeaky Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and, of course, doughty Captain Jack.

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

Never mind that Captain Jack was effectively dead at the end of the last movie. For we discover, very quickly, that the metaphysical laws in the Piratesuniverse are entirely malleable while, equally, narrative causality in the screenplay is entirely optional. Which helps when your incredible plot is trying to depict a ragtag bunch of protagonists racing from a steam-room scene in Singapore to the Arctic Circle to the Underworld and back to the Caribbean for a winner-takes-all final-reel battle against the evil corporate overlords in the East India Trading Company.

Yet, unfortunately, the same lack of narrative sense makes it utterly impossible to care for these protagonists, no matter how noble their fight. Why did Will and Elizabeth go to Singapore in the first place, other than to have a big set-piece punch-up on a nicely dressed soundstage? And why, for that matter, was the Singaporean pirate Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat) introduced at all, considering that he does nothing for the story other than to add some superfluous international demographic cachet?

And while we’re at it, why does every anonymous corporate blockbuster have to sport some pseudo-spiritual anticorporate “message”? Here the East India Trading Company is the sinister face of modernity that’s crushing the freedoms and the mystical way of life signified by, er, piracy. Why can’t the studios stop lying to themselves and deal with their own hegemonic stranglehold on the entertainment industry? And why, for that matter, doesn’t At World’s Endconclude with Captain Jack sailing off into the sunset at the head of the East India Trading Company, flogging Captain Jack dolls, key rings, action figures and chess sets, like his parent company Disney is so keen to do?

Of course, the Pirates movies are all about Depp’s screen-chewing Captain Jack. An equally-billed co-star in the first film, Depp has become the all-important Pooh-Bah for parts 2 and 3. Strange, then, that his screen charm should so clearly diminish in direct proportion to his increasing status within the series. The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote about the effects of mass reproduction on originality. He referred to the death of an object’s artistic “aura” after it has been copied ad infinitum. And certainly, Depp’s Jack in At World’s End, a copy of a copy of a Keith Richards pastiche, is as lifeless as anything the actor has ever put on screen. The unfunny doppelgängers only remind us, unfortunately, of how formulaic and mechanical this once inspired turn has become.

Incidentally, the movie’s much-vaunted Keith Richards cameo is thankfully underplayed (he looks as if he’s just stepped, or slipped, off stage) and contains one of the smartest exchanges (or should that be, one of the three smart exchanges?) in an otherwise comically decrepit film. Elsewhere sturdy character actors such as Rush and Nighy do their best with dialogue that is concerned almost exclusively with betrayals and backstabbing, while Bloom delivers classic hardwood heroics and Knightley gets lost in prognathous poses and Veruca Salt petulance.

Ultimately, however, the real Pirates story is the cruel Faustian pact that heavy-hitting actors such as Depp seem to strike when they join the blockbusting fray. He may have snagged a rumoured $30 million for his work on the sequels, but where has his kudos gone? Where is his trademark credibility? And will he now be remembered, in Oscar tributes and career montages, as Captain Jack for the rest of his professional life? It seems likely.

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