PRO:
[Erupts] into a grand and glorious adventure at the final hour. After lying dead in the water during much of its three-part odyssey, Pirates of the Caribbean has saved the best for last. The third time is the charmed. -- Bruce Newman, San Jose Mercury News
Worth seeing for the jaw-dropping action, the doses of irreverent humor and of course the star power of Depp, Knightley, Rush, Orlando Bloom, Bill Nighy, Chow Yun-Fat and a host of other talented actors who utter their lines with Shakespearean gusto. -- Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times
A thrill-a-minute extravaganza. -- Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune
The third Pirates has tender moments and smashing ones, and if you fix on Depp, you'll manage fine. -- Amy Biancolli, Houston Chronicle
Funner, biggerer, brighterer, bolderer, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is not only okay, it may even be close to good. -- Stephen Hunter Washington Post
CON:
Advice to Johnny Depp fans: enjoy a seafood dinner, skip the beginning, and roll up after half an hour. You won't have missed a thing. -- Anthony Lane, New Yorker
One longs for more scenes featuring Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and less of everything else in this bloated, overwrought and convoluted three-hour misfire. -- Claudia Puig, USA Today
The entire franchise seems on the verge of collapse, propelled to construct ever more grandiose flights of fancy. Without those sequences, there would be nothing there -- but a movie cannot exist on rollick alone. -- Tom Charity, CNN.com
Relentlessly dense and unfathomable; Depp, the heart and soul of the series, doesn't even show up till several reels in. -- Rob Salem, Toronto Star
The plot is not only hard to follow, there seems to be nothing real at stake. Half the characters are already dead, and half the movie seems to involve swordfights with dead people who cant be killed with swords. -- David Ansen, Newsweek
Not so much thought out as strung together -- colorful incident upon colorful incident, but without logic, gathering suspense or any attempt to establish emotional connections between audience and actors. -- Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine
In terms of pure adventure, there's less of it here than in Pirates 2 -- the action doesn't really start until about two hours in, and even then it's hard to understand the shifting allegiances or make sense of why the different sides are fighting.
Depp descends into the shallows of self-parody, and the plot, keen to tie up every narrative loose end, manages to be simultaneously expansive and incomprehensible. -- Rick Groen, Globe and Mail
Ultimately the voyage is so choppy and long that into the third hour I found myself yawning, 'Yo-ho-hum and a very sore bum.' -- Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer
Unconscionably long at 2 hours and 48 minutes, saddled with a plot that badly needed streamlining and running a bit low on humor, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End may not sink, but it certainly sometimes founders. -- Robert Denerstein, Denver Rocky Mountain News
Even longer and less coherent [than Dead Man's Chest]. Consider it a companion piece to the similarly indulgent Spider-Man 3. -- Lisa Rose, Newark Star-Ledger
A glazed, inhuman, cluttered piece of work, a storytelling mishmash that buries the considerable charms of its actors under heavy drifts of silt. -- Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com
Running nearly three hours in length, it continues the pointless excesses of the second film while again entirely missing the romantic charm of the first. -- Tom Long, Detroit News
A ponderous pirate saga, 168 minutes long, with more doldrums than 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'-- Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal
I like my action movies complicated, but At World's End is less a complexity than it is a high seas bazaar with everyone and everything vying for attention. You end up going home with nothing to show for your adventure. -- Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press
Sources include Rotten Tomatoes.