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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 16.4%
Worth A Look: 31.22%
Average: 20.63%
Pretty Bad: 19.58%
Total Crap: 12.17%
14 reviews, 105 user ratings
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| Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest |
by Jason Whyte
"Yar! It's sequelitis, ho ho!"
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What am I missing here? Here I am, sitting in an enormous screening room for an early afternoon screening of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”. I am viewing the film in a downtown location which is a few miles away from a monstrous megaplex that is running the film on multiple screens with endless showtimes. I mention this because the 500+ seat cinema has only about 15 people present, and it is cool and comfortable. I’m in the right mindset to sit back and enjoy the sequel to the hit 2003 film that has now spawned a trilogy. We’re now two-thirds of the way there.And yet, somewhere early on in the proceedings, my mind gave up trying to process the images and sound that came flying out of the projector. I didn’t care. The images are there, in focus and in widescreen. The Dolby Digital soundtrack is rocking in every direction, and yet it made no difference. I didn’t like this film. You know that feeling you get in a cinema when watching a bad movie, that weary feeling where you are trying to stay awake and your eyes keep drifting from the screen only to be rocked awake by a loud sound? It happened to me twice during the final battle.
Anyway. “Dead Man’s Chest” picks up a short while after “The Curse of the Black Pearl” where Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) and Will (A Blank Wall…whoops, Orlando Bloom) are about to marry. They are soon arrested for their crimes in aiding and abetting Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from the first film, and barter a deal where they can give up Sparrow in charge for their freedom. When Jack gets to Sparrow, he is in search of a key for a hidden chest, as is Davy Jones (the wonderful Bill Nighy from “Love Actually”) who desperately wants its contents.
Perhaps the biggest drawback to “Dead Man’s Chest” was something that plagued the first film: it is far too long. Way, way too long. With credits, the film clocks in at 152 minutes and it is far too patience trying for a theme-park kind of film that is really nothing more than a glorified B-movie. There are several passages and sub-plots of the film that could have been excised entirely with no actual loss to the overall package; in fact it would be more of a gain, since this kind of “fun” picture should last only 90 to 105 minutes.
What’s more…if you’re going to have a big summer action blockbuster, how about actually injecting some action into it? I viewed “Mission: Impossible III” again recently, which came in just under the two hour mark and still provided an espionage story and some interesting characters in a movie that was pretty much wall to wall with action. The filmmakers in that movie got exactly what they were going for, and “Dead Man’s Chest” gets too weighed down in conflicting storylines that, as previously mentioned, I was fighting to stay awake. Even the recent “Superman Returns” managed to provide a story that would keep us interested, like any good film should.
Johnny Depp. Few will argue that his performance in the first film was incredible work. Nominated for an Oscar for his wildly original mannerisms and double-entendre dialogue, it was enough for me to recommend the first film (along with some great action sequences and a semblance of a storyline), and here he brings much of the same spirit as he did in the first. Problem is that he isn’t given much to bounce off of; I forgot Orlando Bloom the second he was off screen, and Keira Knightley once again looks fantastic, and I had more fun watching her tanned-face change levels from scene to scene.
I see so many films every year; 300+ a year in fact. I spend more time watching than writing about them, and I feel that I have a firm grasp on cinema culture. And yet I can’t see the real fanbase of this series; despite it making money, to me it feels like another attempt by Disney to cinema-size its theme park offerings. There is the occasional entertaining action scene (the big one that stands out to me involves a sword battle on an old, fleeing wheel) but the film should have been, to quote a filmmaker friend of mine, “Two hours and fun.”150 excruciating minutes later, I’m trying to figure out what made this film so profitable in its first few weeks of release (the $135 million opening weekend baffles me). Perhaps it was a bottled promise of exactly what you want to see. But there’s no real love of film in the film. It just seems something Mr. Bruckheimer does on a daily basis to get the masses to buy a ticket.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14738&reviewer=350
originally posted: 08/01/06 03:54:46
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USA
07-Jul-2006 (PG-13)
DVD: 05-Dec-2006
UK
06-Jul-2006 (12A)
Australia
06-Jul-2006 (M)
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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