Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Director: Gore Verbinski
Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Jack Davenport, Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce
Theater: Regal (Hoyts) Cinemas Bowie, Bowie, MD

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest epitomizes everything that's wrong with Hollywood sequels. It's an easy trap to fall into for the writers, the director, and the actors. If you did X in the first movie, then you need to do X++ in the sequel, right? Uh, no, the sequels that work the best tend to do Y instead, so Aliens is a very different film from Alien, for example. Anyway, unfortunately, it's an X++ sequel so that means Johnny Depp acts weirder, the bad guys are uglier and grosser, the stunts are bigger, the CGI more pervasive in a vain attempt to impress more, the fight scenes are longer (interminable really and often pointless), and the plot more convoluted. They took the premise of the first film and tried to make an epic out of it, but there just wasn't enough story for it to be a real epic in the first place, so they padded it with a lot of action, or worse motion (which is action without purpose). A lot of that could be forgiven if the plot would have just made sense (it makes even less sense than the first movie) and brought some sense of satisfaction. In case you didn't know, PotC 3 is coming out next year and it will conclude the story. Essentially, the writers and director tried to reproduce Empire Strikes Back in this film, but whereas Empire Strikes Back makes me want to watch Return of the Jedi immediately, I don't even care if I ever see PotC 3. Probably the thing that disappoints the most is that they (the writers, the director, and possibly even Depp) just got the character of Jack Sparrow wrong in this film. It's like they forgot what made the character so great, so unique in the first movie. Jack Sparrow isn't a good man who wants to be a bad man or thinks he's a bad man; he's a good man making his way in a world that thinks he's a bad man because he lives his life on his own terms rather than what society expects. I'm not sure if Depp's performance was lost in editing or not, but the Jack Sparrow of this film is a pale imitation of the first film's. I suspect that had as much if not more to do with the writing, direction, and editing than Depp's performance as an actor. Anyway, basically, it was a payday and everyone from the supporting cast to the stars to the writers and director (not to mention the producer and the studio, of course) decided to cash in. Well, I'm cashing out.