Just because you can do something does not mean you have to. Long and noisy is not enough.
"Fifteen men on a dead man's chest,
Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum.
Drink and the Devil had done for the rest,
Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum."
Filmmakers learned a long time ago to be careful with sequels. Just ask George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. After the enormous success of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," about a fellow getting into a series of adventures looking for a supernatural relic, they decided to do something completely different. "Temple of Doom" met with public and critical disapproval, so for their third episode they had Indy getting into a series of adventures looking for a supernatural relic.
The powers that be at Disney must have told director Gore Verbinski and screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio to look for everything that people liked in 2003's "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" and amplify it tenfold in the 2006 follow-up, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest." This means the filmmakers brought back all of the main characters and extended the action even more. The result was the biggest moneymaking movie of the year. It's hard to say if filmgoers went because they really thought this was a great movie or because they liked the first installment and assumed this one would be just as good.
Of course, the character that made the first movie work was Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, the goofy, mincing, half-looney pirate with the quick wit, lovable demeanor, and self-serving attitude. Like most viewers, I liked the character the first time around. The trouble is that Sparrow was at best a caricature, his Keith Richards stage presence a hoot, to be sure, but without a lot of substance beneath the superficial mannerisms. Now, it's more of the same, with a touch of gentle moral guidance toward the end and an explanation that his nutty gait doesn't really mean he's gay or he's seen too many Rolling Stones concerts. It's the result of too much rum. While the writers give Sparrow plenty of sly lines, and Depp is a good enough actor to bring it off with all the proper looks and glances that alone hold much of the film together, a single sketchy characterization is not enough around which to build an entire movie.
Instead, we get Depp running around a lot in a series of sword-fighting, knife-fighting, and just plain fighting scenes that seem more calculated to extend the movie's running time than to develop its plot, characters, moods, atmosphere, or themes. This may be due in part to what the Wife-O-Meter thought was the writers' attempt to pad out the story long enough to make two separate episodes. "Dead Man's Chest" is only the first half of a two-part movie that Disney made at around the same time but will release in two sections a year removed. I'd be willing to bet that by putting the two sections together and cutting out most of the filler, the moviemakers would have created a far better product. This one seems to go on forever, and it's only the first half!
Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley reprise their roles as William Turner and Elizabeth Swann, both of them performing admirably. Bloom may not yet have the on-screen charisma to carry a movie by himself, but in these supporting roles he is exceptionally good. Knightley, meanwhile, as talented as she is beautiful, is fast becoming one of filmdom's most impressive heroines. Now, if only these two actors had more to do than run aimlessly through the movie's fancy sets, things might have been more satisfactory.
The lackluster plot takes up where "Black Pearl" left off, but although the first film left us to suppose that all was well with these folks, it isn't to be. A new magistrate, the evil Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), comes to Port Royale and arrests both William and Elizabeth for aiding and abetting Captain Sparrow's escape, and nothing Elizabeth's father, Governor Weatherby Swann (Jonathan Pryce), can say or do can save them. Except one thing: If William agrees to find Sparrow and bring back his compass, Beckett will free them all. Huh? A compass? So off goes William chasing Sparrow, off goes Elizabeth chasing William, and off goes Sparrow chasing dry land because the demonic Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) is chasing him. And all of them eventually go off chasing a key that unlocks a dead man's chest that only the compass can find. The plot sounds like a video game.
Yes, there is a lot of chasing around in this film, all of it accompanied by a Hans Zimmer musical track that can sometimes be so loud it's hard to understand the dialogue (although, to be fair, I found the soundtrack more of a problem in a theater than at home, where I could adjust the volume). In fact, there is so much chasing around in this film, it quickly becomes tiresome. And it seems like as the film goes on, it gets more frenetic, as though the scriptwriters had run out of story ideas and decided simply to provide a series of action scenes for the sake of the action itself. Surely, there are no reasons for a few of the sequences, like one on a cannibal island and another at the pirate stronghold of Tortuga, other than as pure eye candy and adrenaline rushes. Which is fine, as far it goes, but they do little to advance the story.
And speaking of eye candy, no doubt Disney thought that as much CGI, costuming, and special effects as possible would mask the fact that there is so very little story line involved. I have to admit, "Dead Man's Chest" is fun to look at, with Nighy's makeup particularly effective as a half human, half octopus. And the Disney folks were perceptive enough to include as many homages as possible to past seafaring classics, with visual references to Doug Fairbanks's "Black Pirate," Burt Lancaster's "Crimson Pirate," and their own "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." The kraken, a legendary Scandinavian sea monster probably based on sightings of giant squids, makes a formidable appearance several times.
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[release]19820[/release]