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 can’t be killed with swords. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley expended their chemistry in the first, and best, “Pirates”; by now their love story is running on dead batteries. One gets a brief flicker of hope when Keith Richards shows up as Jack’s well-weathered dad, but he’s given almost nothing to do. The longest, grimmest and least funny of the trilogy, “At World’s End” is best rationalized by the odiously corporate Lord Beckett, whose East India Trading company threatens to end the colorful world of piracy. His villainy, he insists, “isn’t personal. It’s just business.” Indeed.
