Keira becomes a pirate captain, and even a king. Bloom also becomes a pirate captain, but first must choose between freeing his dad from moss and servitude, or having his impossibly hot (but also impossibly high maintenance) girfriend Keira. Well, he can still have her one day every ten years, which means by Wednesday she'll be looking less like Keira and more like Cher.
Also involved in the muddled plot is yet another pirate captain, Barbosa (Geoffrey Rush), whose motive is to free black voodoo goddess Calypso (Tia Dalma), so she can make the long-awaited sequel to Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman before turning into a thousand crabs and causing the perfect storm. And all your favorite comic relief pirates, monkeys, dwarves, and parrots return, especially the ugly dufus who keeps misplacing his eyeball. His role is gradually getting bigger, and if the sequels keep coming he'll probably get to be a pirate captain too.
How others will see it. Of course, the plot, and the relationships between the characters, are so convoluted you need a wall chart to figure things out. Needless to say, fans of the trilogy (so far) won't care much. They've come to see Keira and Bloom look hot, act heroic, and kick ass. They've come to see Johnny Depp act punch drunk in a pirate costume. They've come to watch ships blast each other with cannon in a CGI fury, to see disposable actors get slaughtered in sword fights, and to watch the black woman with bad teeth become fifty feet tall. They haven't come to pay service to the plot. It's just a mishmash, and that chaos is actually the drawing card.
How I felt about it. The nonsense really begins with Depp's arrival. Rocks appear out of nowhere, turn into crabs, and tow his grounded pirate ship to the ocean. Why? Why ask?
Depp's sometime pals then show up. How? Well, they've made their ship fall down a great waterfall in the middle of the ocean (try finding that on a map.) Never mind how Barbosa would know that this would lead to Depp. How do they know how to escape from their surprisingly life-like death? Well, they have to turn their ship upside down at sunset. (Why does this work? Don't ask.) They capsize their own huge ship by running back and forth on the deck as fast as they can. It's all clear now. Sure.
The only constant is that our audience favorites (Depp, Knightley, Bloom, Rush) are certain to show up again and again, like the abuse-taking moles in a whack-a-mole game. They'll keep popping up their heads, no matter what fix they're in, until audiences stop buying tickets, which may never happen.