PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 7/5/06)

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The evolution of Pirates of the Caribbean from theme-park ride to blockbuster film franchise remains one of Hollywood's great mysteries, right up there with Gene Kelly agreeing to star in Xanadu and Crash's Best Picture win. On paper, the mixture of campy pirate humor, overstuffed action sequences, CGI-enhanced baddies and a barely-there narrative shouldn't have worked. And, in fact, the more you think back on the first Pirates, the less it holds together. In addition to its unnecessary 143-minute running time, The Curse of the Black Pearl sported two climaxes too many and featured Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom as the most boring pair of screen lovers since Kevin Costner stiffly wooed Whitney Houston. The real reason for the film's success can be summed up in two words: Johnny Depp. From the moment the perpetually eccentric actor sashayed onto the screen as rock star pirate Jack Sparrow, he hijacked the audience's attention and keeps the movie moving forward. It's no wonder then, that the tagline for the second Pirates adventure is: "Captain Jack is back."

What the ads for Dead Man's Chest don't tell you is that he's not the same man you remember. Not that Depp himself is doing anything differently here; he still slurs half of his dialogue and swans around like the bastard son of Keith Richards (who will make his long-rumored cameo in the third film, due out next summer). For all of Depp's clowning though, Sparrow comes across as an oddly muted presence this time around. While part of that is due to the law of diminishing returns, it's also a symptom of the film's larger flaws. Simply put, Dead Man's Chest is a noisy bore that relies on sound and fury to mask the fact that nothing of any importance is happening onscreen. Obviously that description can apply to most summer blockbusters, but the best of them have something that justifies their existence, be it an ambitious scope (Superman Returns), well-plotted stories (the Bourne films), or, as in the case of Black Pearl , an inspired lead performance. Dead Man's Chest is just a hodgepodge of setpieces in search of a movie.

The experience is made worse knowing how much time, effort and money went into crafting a spectacle this empty-headed. Made for what appears to be a bazillion dollars, Dead Man's Chest is the summer's most impressive bit of eye-candy. The Caribbean locations are gorgeous, the production design is remarkably detailed and the special effects are first-rate. Still, even with all that cash at their disposal, returning director Gore Verbinski and screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio couldn't come up with a story worth telling. The plot is vaguely about a debt that Sparrow owes to Davy Jones (Bill Nighy, playing one of the most impressively rendered CGI-based characters since Gollum), which the fearsome half-man/half-sea creature has returned to collect. Somehow, Will (Bloom) and Elizabeth (Knightley) are pulled back into Sparrow's orbit and alternately find themselves helping or fighting the scalawag. Their motivations for doing so are muddled, but that's par for the course. As written, these characters lack clearly defined goals—events keep happening to them without fitting into a larger narrative arc. In addition, executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer apparently asserted his authority in the editing room, ensuring that not a moment goes by without a loud explosion. He seems to want the audience to leave the theater exhausted rather than exhilarated.

Perhaps the filmmakers' biggest mistake was splitting the sequel into two movies. What we're left with is a middle film that's all middle—it leaps into the action with very little exposition and ends on an out-of-nowhere cliffhanger without any resolution. The last big movie franchise to do this, of course, was The Matrix, and Dead Man's Chest is strikingly similar to the film Reloaded was accused of being: overlong, underplotted and generally dull. Whatever its flaws, at least Reloaded attempted to explore the world introduced in the first film. Dead Man's Chest is best summed up by the scene where Sparrow and Will battle each other atop a runaway water wheel. Like the characters, this movie is just running in circles.
—Ethan Alter