Slap me thrice and hand me to my mother, it's Jack!" The joyous proclamation that greets Cap'n Sparrow could have been uttered by any cinema manager from Annapolis to Zeebrugge, so vital has POTC become to the box office.
Dead Man's Chest, the second in the series, took a cool billion dollars worldwide.
Not bad for an idea that started off life as a theme park ride.
The third, and meant to be the last, in the series hoves into sight with the same crew helming - Gore Verbinski directing with a screenplay by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. At almost three hours, At World's End makes a slow boat to China seem like a speedboat ride round an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
It's bloated, unfathomable and not an eyepatch on The Curse of the Black Pearl, but with the aid of Johnny Depp as Cap'n Jack, Geoffrey Rush as Barbossa and spectacular special effects, it will likely pass muster with fans.
Verbinski flips that idea with an opening so dark it will seem like you've wandered into the wrong film. Scores of pirates are being led to the gallows, a child among them.
Ah, you think. Cap'n Jack is going to swoop from the ramparts like a cross between Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Larry Grayson, utter a cheeky bon mot and rescue the nipper. Nope.
These are black times in the piracy game, with the British government and the East India Company in league to clean up the seas.
Jack is beyond caring, beyond everything. Last seen stepping into the maw of a sea monster in Dead Man's Chest, the captain has gone to the other side.
The other side in this case being Davy Jones's locker, limbo or more likely a rather nice island with a six-star hotel just out of sight. It falls to his old muckers Barbossa, Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) and Will (Orlando Bloom) to rescue him for selfish reasons.
Yun-Fat as a pirate lord, it takes at least 40 minutes for Depp to appear.
On his dreadlocked head the starriest of entrances is bestowed. The screen fades to grey, pauses, then bursts into blinding white light followed by a close-up of Depp. All that's missing is a "Here's Johnny!
" For the rest of the film, Verbinski overcompensates for the previous lack of Jack by having coachloads of them spill from the character's imagination to variously offer counselling, crew his desert ship and spring him from jail.
Breeding Jacks like rabbits is a lazy but understandable move on Verbinski's part. Depp has always been Pirates' greatest treasure, yet there were other factors that made the first in the series a surprise hit.
Chief among them was humour. Pirates was a Hollywood blockbuster so camp and silly it could almost have been a ye olde Carry On movie with a dash of Ealing. When At World's End plays to that strength it can still raise a smile.
In one scene, the ship is sailing through waters filled with the dead. Ragetti (Mackenzie Crook) and his mate, Pintel, are gazing in awe at the passing Ophelias. A haunting beauty hangs about the scene, swiftly punctured by Crook musing: "I wonder what would happen if you dropped a cannonball on one?
"
Elsewhere the strain of the threequel is evident. Elizabeth and Will's romance, never much of a firecracker to start with, putters on. Depp, earning his money again, squeezes the last drop of life from Jack.
The character was, of course, inspired by Keith Richards, rock'n'roll's very own buckler of swashes, who makes a brief but embarrassing appearance as Jack's dad. It's like watching grandpa break dance. Stick to the day job, Keef.
As for the convoluted plot, my advice would be to ignore it but that leaves a lot of time to fill between Depp and the admittedly marvellous action scenes. There's an end of an era mood, as if everyone was of a mind that they were not going to pass this way again so to hang with the budget.
That said, and it may have been a scurvy-induced hallucination caused by 168 minutes adrift in the cinema, the ending left the way open for a fourth in the series.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Cash-In Continues, perhaps. It's a destiny that may have even been foretold in traditional pirate fashion. As Barbossa says to Jack (feel free to punctuate with your own "ayes", "aaars" and "me hearties"): "There's never any guarantee of coming back, but passing on, that's dead certain.
" On that the box office, not the critics, will have the final say.
What are these links for?
If you liked this article and would like to share it with others on the web who might be searching for good content we've made it easy for you to do it.
At the bottom of all articles, you'll see links to six sites. These sites - commonly called 'social bookmark' or 'social news' sites - have large communities of web users who share and rate interesting, useful and fun things on the web.
Clicking the links will automatically add the address of the story you are reading to one of these sites, letting you share it with others.
Each site will ask you to register to share stories. Registration is free and once a member, you can store, recommend and search for stories that interest you.
News RSS