By Sam Jemielity

Packed with balletic swordfights and thundering sea battles, cheeky humor and macabre and magnificent special effects, At World's End is further buoyed by the undeniable star power of whirling dervish Johnny Depp, feisty beauty Keira Knightley and action-movie stud Orlando Bloom. There's more than enough drama, wit, romance and intrigue to keep any movie fan glued to his seat for 90 minutes. But this sequel runs well over two-and-a-half hours. A better subtitle might have been "Lost At Sea." Between its many soaring moments, the much-awaited follow-up to the disappointing cliff-hanger of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest often slows to a crawl, like a schooner with no wind.

Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp) was killed by the sea beast Kraken at the end of Dead Man's Chest. At World's End picks up with Captain Jack in Davy Jones's Locker -- depicted as a kind of existential, Saharan hell where he's tortured by numerous doppelgängers of himself. Will Turner (Bloom), Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) and Elizabeth Swann (Knightley) must recover Sparrow (who is one of the Pirate Lords) from the realm of the undead, convene the other eight Lords of the Brethren Court (who are hanging out in quasi-retirement in the remote Shipwreck Cove) and battle pirate-bashing Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) and the East India Company.

The overly intricate plot involves too many bizarre settings, too much double-crossing, too many convoluted allegiances. You've got: the imperialist British; Davy Jones and his ghoulish undead crew; Barbossa (Rush) and Will (Bloom) and their inscrutable agendas; and of course swashbuckling court jester Sparrow, who's on his own side. At times, the matter of who's fighting whom for what had our head spinning like the compass of a ship caught in a maelstrom. That's not the kind of mental headache we like at a summer blockbuster with our popcorn and 64-ounce "medium" soda. The rivalry between Sparrow and Barbossa -- a driving force in the first Pirates movie -- has cooled to a kind of curmudgeonly détente, and the drama suffers from it.

Not that At World's End totally runs aground -- far from it. The visual thrills of the special effects are worth the admission price, although the slimy, calamari-headed Davy Jones is one image we find tough to stomach. Depp is such a magnetic screen presence, it's easy to see why the director had a hard time chopping scenes that probably shouldn't have made the final edit. Rolling Stones guitar god Keith Richards has an entertaining cameo as Jack Sparrow's father, and Barbossa and his crew provide plenty of comic relief. It's just not enough to sustain quite so long of a voyage.