Quick! Get me a martini. Make it really big. On second thought, forget the Martini, just bring me the gin. In a bottle, forget the glass. I've just spent two and a half hours withs a film that makes absolutely no sense. At first I thought okay, it's me. If only I'd paid more attention to Parts One and Two, then I'd have this thing nailed. And then I thought maybe the reels just got mixed up at the theatre, and nobody spotted the difference, but then I realized that this film wouln't make more sense even if the reels were in the right order.

Let's see: There's the sequence up in the Arctic, (what were they doing up there? And how did they get there?) Then the sequence in the desert (yes, Jack's ship is there, being carried to the sea by a phalanx of sand crabs.) Then there's Davy Jones's, well, not his locker but his ship; there's bad old Norrington, there's Chow Yun-Fat and even Keith Richard, who looks dead as Jack's father and acts it too. All of which might have been amusing if only someone had thought to make it funny. In fact what this film doesn't have is a smidgeon of wit; even Johnny Depp, whose swish was marvelous in the first two films. is moved to the side of the plot here and is hampered by lines of dialogue so uninteresting that even his trademark mugging can't make them work. And it's all hammered from beginning to end by a music track so loud, so unrelenting (by Hans Zimmer), so insistent that everything be underlined by great orchestral crescendos that you'd just want to throw somethng at the screen.

I thought, someone with a better comprehension than I must have found some underlying structure here, and in fact I found a synopsis in an Australian review of the film by Louise Keller and I give it to you here as a public service; make of it what you will. "Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightly) and Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) embark on a desperate quest to gather the heads of all the pirate clans, the Nine Lords of the Brethren Court, their only hope to defeat Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander), the Flying Dutchman, and his Armada. But one of the Lords is missing. Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), either the best or worst pirate ever, and now trapped in Davy Jones's Locker. But even with Jack somehow, mysteriously, back in the bosom of the Brethren, and even after acquiring the necessary charts from Chinese pirate Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat), the motley crew has to deal with betrayals and hidden agendas before facing the mother of all sea battles that could see the freedom-loving pirates eradicated from the face of the earth." Okay, if you say so. I couldn't have done better myself. Keller does go on to say that it still makes no sense to her either, which shows her good taste.

The film was shot at the same time as "Pirates II," and must have been an afterthought, because it's obvious that the screenwriters just threw whatever they had up onto the screen and hoped it would stick. It doesn't.