PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST

Directed by Gore Verbinski
Screenplay by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
Starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Jack Davenport, Jonathan Pryce, and Stellan Skarsgård

Reviewed by Matthew C. Brown
July 8 2006

Be careful what you wish for, the wise man said, and just because we all spent the summer of 2003 hoping that they would do something - anything! - to further the adventures of one Captain Jack Sparrow, doesn't mean that any such effort would necessarily succeed at the mighty feat of piracy that we kindly call Dodging the Bullet Twice. A movie out of a theme park ride at Disney's corporate American fat farm? How in the hell does that not suck???

The great jaw-dropper of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was, of course, the simple fact that such a seemingly lame-duck concept for a movie could turn out to be the single most entertaining motion picture of the past decade. Even there, though, the success seemed less like preordained genius and more like a whole lot of lightning caught in a great quantity of bottles. Repeating that trick would be hard.

But there's bounty to be had, so one can hardly have expected the rapacious robber-barons of Big Mouse to have stood idly by. The good news about Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, other than the slightly shorter title (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End promises even greater brevity), is that it's still a hell of an entertaining movie, with more cinematic joy for your buck in its pinky finger than most other movies this summer have had in their entire corpulent bodies. At 2½ hours, the flick also by no means lacks for storytelling satisfaction. The narrative here is huge. And it's only the first bit of the big show.

The bad news, sadly, is that as sequels go, Dead Man is hardly an (eye) patch on Curse. Not even close.

There are two key elements missing here:

1. A Bad Guy. This might seem a strange statement, given that we've all stood gaga-eyed at the sheer visual brilliance that is Bill Nighy's Davy Jones, a mesmerizing villain brought to the screen in an unholy combination of an actor's slippery wit, Industrial Light & Magic's crowning achievement in character animation, and the single freakiest design of any character, ever, in history, ever. If the studio puts out a DVD that is just an endless loop of every single frame of Davy Jones' animation elements, I will sit staring at it for days on end. Jones looks so good he borders on transcendentally hypnotic. The problem, though, is that the big bastard doesn't even show up until about halfway through the picture! By film's end, this seems to have been cannily explained by the dawning realization that we're only watching the first half of a five- or six-hour epic, and that on those terms, Jones in fact arrives even before the end of Act I. For Dead Man's Chest as a film proper, however, this is a serious problem. Curse had the sense to endear us to Geoffrey Rush's serpentine hobo Barbossa almost before we'd even gotten to know Cap'n Jack, and that film never lacked for the simple narrative impetus of two such natural enemies drawing ever closer to the same, mutually-exclusive goal. Without a similar antagonism until well into its second half, Chest has little wind in the sails.

2. A Good Guy! Another surprising statement, but there is a serious problem in this film with Captain Jack Sparrow. A friend of mine is fond of pointing out that we, as an audience, can get behind any character as long as he's good at his job... and this time out, Sparrow is a fucking terrible pirate. He's all bumbling, all the time, and the result is a surprisingly unlikeable turn for someone who is, admittedly, the only character of the past five years - not Superman, not Batman, not Obi-Wan Kenobi - who actually received a full round of applause from the audience at the moment he first emerged, dripping, from a floating coffin. For someone that everybody seems to love with reckless abandon, it's pretty hard to like Jack in Dead Man's Chest. The script makes no bones about the fact that he is physically and metaphorically rudderless, but that don't make for good narrative. It isn't until the film's very last moments - when Jack's compass finally points to the thing he wants most, with melancholy results - that the character finally comes into his own. As with Jones' teasing arrival, that's a long time to wait for something we should have had from frame one.

The others, on the whole, fair better. It's nice to see Kevin McNally's Gibbs back for a larger role the second time around, and Naomie Harris absolutely cranks one out of the park as a freaky/sexy voodoo priestess. Orlando Bloom continues to inhabit the most thankless role in the franchise - playing a capable, friendly, good-hearted shmuck - but he looks good doing it, and in the limited iconography of the Pirates movies, that means something. And Keira Knightley, an actress who in her most recent film role somehow managed to mutate her screen presence into something resembling a pissed-off male pirannha, is back in drool-inducing form here. Her role is better written than last time, and Keira's better at playing it, bringing the charm and the eye-gougingly hot in equal measure. There is nothing in the world I would not eat off her.

The script, again by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, never lacks for sprawl. There's an entire first act involving a band of cannibals and a merry adventure for Jack and Will that, in retrospect, is completely unrelated to the plot. There's a new authoritarian bad guy in Port Royal, which at first seems to be the thinly-glossed result of failed contract negotiations with Jack Davenport... until Davenport shows up at the end of the first act and proceeds to toss himself about in what is, probably, the best-developed character in the movie. There's some detailed father-son angst between Will and the man who, for those of us who did the math last time, spent approximately a decade alive at the bottom of the ocean thanks to the cursed Aztec gold. There's not one, but two opportunities for swashbuckling heroes to get involved with Big Things That Roll, and the corollary chances for Gore Verbinski to strut his Spielbergisms. There's a nonsensical MacGuffin involving Davy Jones' still-beating heart that is never harmoniously explained, nor ever needs to be. When Dead Man's Chest is over, you feel like you've seen about six movies, all fully-formed. And, as mentioned previous, it's only the beginning.

Yup, Dead Man's Chest does a one-up on The Two Towers, Back to the Future Part II, and The Matrix Reloaded by offering the most satisfying, and scream-inducing, cliffhanger shock-shot to ever grandly grace the screen in this era of back-to-back-to-back film production. There's something to be said for knowing your film franchise will continue unfettered, just ten months hence, for letting you pull out the big, grin-growing teases.

There must also, however, be something to be said for making these things one at a time. Chest's biggest problems all seem rooted in that sure-footed certainty that the show will go on, no matter what. In the race to make the first half of a six-hour pirate movie, the film often forgets to be where it is, instead of where it's going. It's frustrating. Gone is the effortless zeal, the rigging-diving grace, of Pirates 1, replaced by Orphean complexities and labyrinthine plot points. I fear that somewhere along the line, someone forgot their source material. It's just a theme park ride, after all.