rated PG-13 

It’s oddly intriguing that a company like Disney, which continues to sell itself as the last bastion of American, white-bread gee-whiz innocence, has worked so diligently to proliferate a mythology that celebrates hard drinking, public execution, self-mutilation, dishonesty, disloyalty, abhorrence, lawlessness, selfishness, hypocrisy, dubious sexuality, dark magic, murder and heathen god worship.

We live in exciting times.

Director Gore Verbinski’s comic, laissez-faire approach to this material can easily distract from the fact that every character involved in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” is a villain. There’s not a single sculduggerous hand on deck here that doesn’t engineer some sort of double-cross against both friend and foe. There’s an awful lot going on, and it could seem something of a chore to keep all the duplicitous, backstabbing, shifty-eyed machinations straight,  if that were necessary. The good news is that this knotted, over-plotted monkeyfist of interwoven storylines serves specifically to create bigger opportunities for bombast, sword clash and cannon blast – which are served in gluttonous helpings throughout.

One of the biggest surprises may be how effectively every single chracter arc, large or small, set up in the previous installments, is woven to neat conclusion. Elizabeth’s drive for independence; Williams quest for his lost father; their long delayed marriage are all taken in hand. Can Barbossa regain command? Will Norrington get his redemption? How will East India Company’s treacherous Admiral Beckett get his comeuppance? What’s up with the voodoo fortune-teller?  Why is Davey Jones so heartless, and how is it connected to his love for the sea? It’s all tied up by the end. Some of the most mundane of characters and objects are revealed to hold unforeseen and critical import. Even the fate of “that dog with the keys” becomes a surprising piece of the puzzle.

Under all of these converging currents, however, within all of these surfacing storylines, the one steadfast riptide is Johnny Depp’s swaggering, staggering Captain Jack Sparrow.  Always the wind in these movies’ sails, he emerged fully formed in his memorable initial appearance in the first film and hasn’t evolved one whit. In a few brief, surreal and terrifically subversive moments, a deeper sense is hinted at how batshit crazy Captain Jack might actually be, but otherwise he remains virtually unchanged. Depp’s charisma in the role nearly eclipses the fact that the main story arc really concerns Elizabeth and William. He does great enough a job that it can be difficult to remember that he’s just a supporting character, simply acting as catalyst to drive, inspire and corrupt the principles.

Even with the astonishing amount of monsters, magic, bloodshed and havoc rendered in this a two-hour-and-47-minute man-o-war, the filmmakers swindle us out of a few very important moments. In “Dead Man’s Chest”, they introduced the Kraken as one of cinemas most fearsome monsters in the depths, here they dismiss it entirely with a sentence, killing it off-screen between movies (probably saving 10 minutes in screen time, and as many millions in FX dollars). Having gone to great lengths to amass a pirate armada to face off against a hundred East India warships, only two of them finally come to blows while the rest sit anchored in the background.  Also, after peppering the whole movie with references to the unfathomable anger and infinite power of the captured sea-goddess Calypso, her inevitable release is shrugged off in a throw away scene, embarrassingly evocative of an old “Sinbad” picture. The irony is not lost when one of the crew members of the Black Pearl sums the moment up with a simple, “That’s it?”

Points to Verbinski for making a trilogy that against all conventional standards of late, behaves like a trilogy - wrapping itself up as promised and coming to a satisfying conclusion. But even greater praise for cleverly managing to hold doors open for key characters to return. Though this trilogy has always pointed to the tragic close of an adventurous era, when Captain Jack spreads out his stolen charts in the final scene it’s made clear that there are still many waters yet to explore. Raise anchor, me hearties, and set sail