Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

A big-budget sequel to the fans of The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.


But when 2003's Pirates was good, it danced; Johnny Depp played Capt. Jack Sparrow as a cross between Dean Martin and Errol Flynn, and Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley gave us a nice balance of hot and heroic. This is why it's so sad to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest -- a movie waterlogged and weighed down by plot devices and extraneous characters that's got all the sprightly grace of a man long drowned.

Dead Man's Chest starts with a bang, certainly -- with Bloom's Will Turner and Knightley's Elizabeth Swann both arrested for their complicity in helping Depp's Sparrow escape. But screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio take that nice, tight bump of a start and lard it with invention after invention, and succeed in boring the audience absolutely. There are unique keys; drawing of said unique keys; magical compasses; signifying tumors; magic jars of earth; official letters; disembodied hearts... The script for this film groans beneath object after object, quest after quest, complication after complication . It's not that Dead Man's Chest peters out in the final act; it's that it peters out in the first five minutes, with writing misfire after writing misfire. When I say 'writing misfire,' I feel obligated to give an example, so here's just one: I actually checked my watch when we had Depp, Bloom and Knightley in the same location: One hour and forty-five minutes into a two-and-a-half-hour film, and the leads are finally sharing a scene.

Curse of the Black Pearl was wrapped in a certain amount of supernatural hugger-mugger, but Dead Man's Chest is, again, swathed in it until it's immobile -- right down to the bad guy, Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), a half-human, half-fish pirate buccaneer, who looks like the corporate logo of H.P. Lovecraft's estate started bottling a cheap rum cooler. Jones' heart itself is locked away in the title chest, and that gives Jones control of the Kraken -- a special-effects Leviathan that can crack a ship apart in its howling maw and grasping tentacles -- that bolsters Jones' crew of semi-human sea-creature pirates. This movie, wrapped every story, every legend in the pirates of the world, into some humourous movie, that will make u realize that is only the story about Capt. Jack Sparrow.