Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Sequels, especially ones which are the middle chapter in a trilogy, often let down fans of the first movie. The Empire Strikes Back was a notable exception, often cited as the best of the six by fans, but The Two Towers (despite being a terrific movie IMO) is generally considered a letdown. The reason, even in the best of cases seems fairly straightforward: the first film opens the big can of worms and the main characters surprise and seduce us while the second still doesn’t resolve the conflict and we already know the characters.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is fighting welterwight compared to these heavyweight classics, and is an enjoyable two and a half hours, but still falls into the middle movie canyon. I suspect only the most ardent of Johnny Depp fans were expecting anything like what his Captain Jack Sparrow character turned out to be in Curse of the Black Pearl and others were wondering why the excellent, if eccentric, actor signed on for a movie based on a theme park ride; Eddie Murphy’s The Haunted Mansion, released around the same time, certainly turned out to be the weak effort most were projecting for Pirates.

Curse, though, was a revelation and showed that a little imagination, a bit of discipline and a smidge of over the top acting go a long way. The problem is that this time the audience expects much more, the big surprises have been shot out of the cannons. So to speak.

Yet Dead Man’s Chest still succeeds. Reviewers were not particularly kind but the fairly full theater we saw it in laughed a lot and left talking and smiling. The barebones plot perhaps tracked a thousand previous pirate/romantic comedies but director Gore Verbinski, writers Ted Elliot & Terry Rossio (not involved in the first PotC but they did co-write Shrek) and the special effects crew did a really good job giving us new material.

The character of Will Turner’s father was terrific, both in dialog and Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd‘s performance. The sequence with Sparrow, Turner, Norrington and the cannibal tribesmen, particularly the sword fight between the three men inside a dislodged waterwheel as it careens down a mountain–I’d buy the DVD just to see the making of this! Bill Nighy’s Davey Jones was another treat, but Nighy’s done so many good roles lately I wonder why he wasn’t a bigger star when younger. Keira Knightly, well, she’s smart and aggressive and as cute as ever.

Of course now the crew has got a really huge hill to climb with next year’s conclusion. All the major characters return, including Jonathon Pryce, Geoffrey Rush, Naomie Harris (the voodoo priestess) and Nighy plus Yun Fat Chow as a Chinese pirate captain and possibly even walking dead rocker Keith Richards as Depp’s daddy, so the Magic 8 Ball says: “Outlook Sunny!”

definitely recommended