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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest review
2006.07.23 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole
Fifteen pounds on a girly man's chest. [official site] |
A huge, rollicking, rambling, stumbling, whirling, elephant-on-ice-stakes of a movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is big enough to be both a success and a failure—and possibly a cult classic. It stars Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly, but not really. It really stars Johnny Depp and enough special effects to keep the whole film crew in hookers and booze for ten years.
The film picks up where PotC: Curse of the Black Pearl left off. Will and Elizabeth never quite got married, and Captain Jack Sparrow is on the run. The not-nearly-nasty-enough Cutler Beckett arrives to twist the arms of Will and Governor Swann on behalf of the East India Company and get the plot moving in hopes of retrieving Sparrow's magic compass or whatever he's using his compass to find. Meanwhile, Sparrow's compass isn't helping him find what he's looking for, and time is running out, because Davy Jones himself (Bill Nighy, in the role God George Lucas created CGI for) is closing in to claim Jack's soul, per their deal 13 years before.
If you have small children, you may want to take notes and draw a diagram for them later. |
From there, the plot gets complicated. If you have small children, you may want to take notes and draw a diagram for them later. Seriously.
Pretty much the entire cast of the first film returns, including the two annoying comic relief pirates and the undead monkey. Gore Verbinski directs again, with writers Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio reprising their penmanship. But producer Jerry Bruckheimer is really at the helm, spraying money out of a firehose at whatever isn't already completely soaked.
There are points in this film when there is so much going on at once, so little of which really makes much sense, that it's genuinely dizzying. It's like being drunk at an amusement park: you can enjoy just looking at all the flashing lights, noise, and action, but if you try to get on that ride, you're going to throw up.
It tries to do too much, with separate storylines for Sparrow, Will, Elizabeth, and both villains, no more than two of whom are ever acting in the same room at the same time. And parts seem to be stuck in just to set up the third film (Davy Jones can only go on land once every ten years? Hmmm....).
It could only be less satisfying if it actually ended with a character's dialog in mid-sentence. |
The ending is not even a cliff-hanger, but actually merely indicates the existence of a cliff in the distance without doing us the courtesy of letting us think we have resolution because the hero has gone over the cliff to his doom. It could only be less satisfying if it actually ended with a character's dialog in mid-sentence.
And it's long. That's not bad in itself. But, at 150 minutes and with the promise of another film on the way, it still feels as tho whole chapters of the screenplay were jettisoned for time. At one point, we find Jack Sparrow in the role of honorary chief of a tribe of cannibals with no real explanation.
And the story is a rough thumbnail sketch of a logical setup. Sent to the Flying Dutchman as a down payment for souls Sparrow will provide as trade for his own, Will makes a bargain with Davy Jones which his father, the legendary Bootstrap Bill, clumsily joins for no reason and no gain. He loses his soul for eternity while Will just needed to know the location of a key that he already had a picture of. Will, you may remember from the first film, is an expert metal-worker who should have been able to make the key out of scrap metal in any fireplace.
Clearly it is Depp's Jack Sparrow that is the darling of the production set. |
Bloom and Knightly do their best with their weakly written characters. Clearly it is Depp's Jack Sparrow that is the darling of the production set. Yet he's written this time as a man who has everything he needs yet, for no reason that is articulated, still can't get what he wants.
Still, the sights and the sounds of the midway are spectacular. And perhaps on second viewing it will seem to weave and spin a little less. The special effects, especially around Davy Jones and his damned crew, are incredible. And I found myself genuinely liking the character of Norrington (Jack Davenport), the arrogant captain from the first film, now a scurvy drunk willing to sign on to a pirate ship.
And I know I'll sign on this pirate ship myself for the third go-round. Altho, maybe for that one I'll bring a flask of rum with me to the theater and see how it plays on a real bender.
f e e d b a c k
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