Spectacle and Slapstick Cover Up Spectacular Failure of Story

Rating: 3/10 (30 May 2007)

The title of my review more or less summarizes what I thought of this film in one handy headline-like sentence.
Does anybody not realize how many millions upon millions of dollars were spent on special effects in this movie, and how many insane sequences Verbinski and Co. created with that money? No? Good. Then let's move on to why it sucks.
First: Massive portions of both this film and its predecessor (Dead Man's Chest) were completely ludicrous and seemed to have been invented as the writers went along. Insane sequences come out of seemingly nowhere and magically solve whatever current boring problem the heroes (who we hardly care about by this point) are trying to solve.
Example: Every part of the crew's attempt to bring Jack Sparrow back from his untimely fate in Davy Jones' Locker. I don't have any problem with magic in movies, but when it has no rules and seemingly no logic or any mechanism of restriction (other than what the writers want it to do for them), how can I be expected to come anywhere close to suspending my disbelief? Other examples of this complete disregard for plausibility within the writers' story include: Davy Jones' seemingly endless and unexplained powers. The out-of-nowhere revelation about the stabbing of his heart (which should have been set up in the previous movie). The unnecessary and unexplained plot device of Sparrow's find-what-you-want-most compass. Sao Feng's magical maps, also completely unexplained. Barbarosa's almost completely dismissed reappearance.
Other holes in logic appear throughout the story, but I won't spend the time displaying them all. You get the point.
The second major problem is the complete lack of concern for the characters. There is entirely too much backstabbing in this film. Not only is it confusing (how many times did you wonder who was trying to accomplish what and for what reason? Be honest.) It completely undermines their relationships and frankly makes them very unlikeable. They all seem willing to betray each other at the drop of a hat; Yes, they're pirates, but in the first movie they were pirates with honor and friendship. Now all they seem to care about is their own selfish desires. So even when I understood what they were trying to accomplish with their endless betrayals (which was only occasionally), I didn't really care because they were all such friendless bastards that I had no desire to watch them pop through another implausible misadventure.
Oh yeah, and what was with that whole East India Trading Company storyline? Did anyone else find it pointless and its conclusion entirely unsatisfying and unbelievable? Finally, I'd like to make a note to all movie screenwriters and directors who might read this review: Just because you can show something with computer graphics and make it look incredibly realistic, that doesn't mean it could actually happen or that you can make me believe that it could actually happen. Show a little restraint, please. We don't need to see Jack Sparrow swinging around on ropes with crazy abandon for fifteen minutes in a row. Even Tarzan never accomplished the kind of crazy swinging acrobatics Jack did in this sequence. I miss the days when technology forced you to show a little restraint in what you make appear on the screen; it made things so much less... Ludicrous.
After all of this criticism, I'd like to point out there there were a few things I liked about the movie. Though it showed up at inappropriate moments at times, the wit and slapstick humor did make me laugh. The beginning and ending were actually fairly decent, if you ignore the crazy special effect-driven insanity I just mentioned. Some of the core ideas would have been good if they had been executed much better.
Of course, executing them well would have required rewriting both this and the previous film into a single, simplified, tidied up story. Which is what the filmmakers should have done. This current obsession with trilogies is ridiculous, and is constantly sabotaging what could have otherwise been great pairs of movies.
Let me wrap this lengthy review up by stating frankly that I wish I had never wasted three hours on this movie. It was boring, confusing, and the few tiny bright spots couldn't come close to making up for the near-complete lack of planning on the part of the writers. Three stars in generous, but what the hell. I like Johnny Depp.