I distinctly remember the first two Pirates of the Caribbean films being fun.  They worked like a teeter-totter—trying to weigh campy acting and comic innovation against the ridiculously serious business of their incoherent plots.  In spite of the broad strokes, they were deceptively simple and delicate balancing acts.  With Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, someone threw a load of self-importance on the latter end while the fun-and-games part went off to have coffee.  Remember, this is a franchise based on a Disney theme park ride featuring a bungling pirate modeled after a British rocker who has to deal with men who are slowly turning into sea creatures.  Whose bright idea was it to treat this stuff like a Patrick O'Brian novel?  Gone are the clever, innovative action sequences, and practically gone is the tongue-in-cheek handling of the material.  Instead, we have generic sea battles (against men becoming sea creatures, though), occasionally violent moments, tons of new mythology and secret revelations (none of which mean much, and all of which feel forced), and a tone more in tune with a serious epic than a post-modern swashbuckler.  It's not a terrible movie, but it is terribly misguided and highly disappointing.

It all starts with a young boy being hung.  I chuckled when they brought out the barrel for him to stand on, then I realized it was meant to be taken seriously and felt bad.  Then all the condemned pirates started singing a pirate song, and I chuckled again.  This time when I realized it was meant to be serious, I didn't feel so bad.  After all, when did this become Les Miserables?  Anyway, the East India Trading Company is trying to eliminate all pirating from the seas, and in the singing of the song, nine pieces of eight that are held by the nine pirate lords across the world are awakened or signaled or something to tell them a meeting of the brethren court is in order.  Capt. Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) and Elizabeth Swan (Keira Knightley) are in Singapore to convince Capt. Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat) to help them in their quest to rescue Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from Davy Jones' Locker.  Negotiations failing, they, along with Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), steal Feng's map to the end of the world, where the underworld is located, to find Jack, attend the court's meeting, and stop the EITC from using Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) to attack pirates.

The plot here is even more convoluted than the previous installments, with lots of new characters introduced and older ones discovering or revealing their fates and secrets, and is it ever heavy-handed.