Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest Directed by Gore Verbinski With Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom Rated PG-13 Now playing
Grade: B-
In film trilogies, the second installment of a franchise is usually one of the most complicated. It needs to advance the storyline, but can also produce new obstacles for protagonists. Character development should takes place, but a story doesn't need to neatly wrap up in two hours.
In the annals of movie history, sometimes this middle film delivers and sometimes it does not. "The Empire Strikes Back" was a landmark film despite being the middle piece of the first "Star Wars" trilogy. "The Matrix Reloaded" was intriguing, but ultimately primed audiences for a convoluted disappointment in the final act. "The Temple of Doom" stood on its own as a movie and included some impressive set pieces, but was decidedly the weakest of the three Indiana Jones features.
This brings us to "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest." The best analogy here is to the aforementioned "Reloaded." Both franchises started with surprising hit films that inspired sequels, and both have presented second films that included bombastic special effects but increasingly cryptic storylines. This is what confines "Dead Man's Chest" as a distinctive film. There is a lot of action and a lot of set-up, but the ultimate payoff will not be known until next summer.
Johnny Depp, reprising his role as fey, drunken, Keith Richards-inspired Captain Jack Sparrow, is once again the most memorable character in the film. While his novelty has worn thin, his responses to the direst of situations are still comedically inspired.
Orlando Bloom as Will Turner and Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann are the two characters for whom the audience is meant to care the most, but are so overshadowed by Depp's caricature that they are often left in his wake.
Bloom has now been in some of the biggest action movies of the last five years yet gives no discernable deviation of character. Knightley is a little better, but her schizophrenic Swann still unrealistically seesaws between driven femme fatale and damsel in distress.
More interesting here is the introduction of squid-faced Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), the mysterious and power-hungry Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) and the downfall of former Admiral Norrington (Jack Davenport), whose newfound moral ambiguity is becoming par for the course for characters in this series. In reality, the ethics of all of these characters are questionable to an extent, and they are willing to endanger or kill others to seek greater power or save their own skin.
This is problematic for "Dead Man's Chest" because it bills itself as a family-oriented action movie, but none of these characters are inspiring. Jack's entire crew of pirates are massacred not once but twice during this film, sending a message that some lives are simply stock.
In the first movie, Jack was ultimately saved by the fact that his crewmates eschewed the "Pirate Code" and came back to rescue him. In this one, there is no similar camaraderie and it is difficult for the audience to become attached to any character because of the constant threat that one will turn on another. The charm of the first film was that no one was ever quite sure which side Jack was on. When this is extended to all other characters in the second, the movie becomes mean-spirited.
Overall, this is a difficult film to judge because it is really just the first half of a long movie split in two, so it is not fair to condemn one part without seeing the whole. This movie has a lot of FX pomp and circumstances (including both a memorable yet ridiculous battle on a spinning mill wheel), and at 150 minutes it certainly delivers length for the buck.
Sadly, though, without a solid ending to tie this trilogy together, "Dead Man's Chest" will be remembered as the movie where Pirates went overboard.
