Overrated.

Rating: 6/10 (23 July 2006)

This movie was too long, boring, and I'm tired of hearing about it.
They throw a lot of exhibitionary plot that ultimately serves no purpose in your face, right away, and then the rest of the movie is just silly situations -- most of which without a purpose.
For example: the entire sequence with the crew of the Pearl on the island with the natives. What was the point of that? Nothing was gained. They went ashore to avoid Davey Jones but, did we need a 25-minute excursion to see Johnny Depp prance around? Additionally, Jack Sparrow was a total douchebag in this movie; not like "he's a rogue, he can be a smart-ass but he's not a bad guy" either...he was an out-and-out jerk. He sends William right into danger. He then hits on Elizabeth. Why am I supposed to be rooting for him, again? Dialogue would give you a pretty good idea of what -- to an almost exact degree -- the next 15 minutes of story would be like and then those next 15 minutes would pan out exactly like you expected and it would just be boring.
You kept waiting for things to get interesting but they never did. It was a step-by-step story that never took any strange turns. In addition to telling you exactly where the story was going, it would very plainly tell you what was going on without telling you why it was really happening or why anyone should care. The story was weak, shallow, and while shallow movies can work very well (see: the first Pirates of the Caribbean film), this one was held together with popsicle sticks and Krazy Glue.
The lady in the Swamp was a great barometer of just how hard they tried to make this movie deep and vast but never succeeded. They travel to this distant place to talk to this lady and she just magically is able to tell our heroes what they need to know, what they need to get there, blah blah blah. She was a stepping stone and you couldn't even understand half of what she was saying.
The acting was fine but some of the effects were really lame (most of the Kraken effects and wide shots of the Davey Jones ship going underwater and surfacing), which was odd because they did a pretty great job on Davey and his crew's CGI-full faces...which, incidentally, were just showcases of "look how cool we can make things with CGI!". Those characters were boring but they Bedazzled them with effects so that you would at least take a second look at them.
Also, there was no reason to force Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley's characters back into this story. Their arcs ended with the first film (which was a self-contained story and when you make a first chapter without any intention of a second and third, you should not try to force all elements of the first into sequels); the way in which we were expected to believe they were back in Jack's story was really flimsy and boring.
Additionally, the reason this film is getting such incredible praise and doing extraordinarily well at the box-office is because everything else blockbuster-wise this summer has been a tremendous disappointment (X3, Mission Impossible 3, Superman Returns, The DaVinci Code, Poseidon, etc.). The critics saw this was probably their last real chance to grasp onto something and run with it, so they did. If you read some of the early reviews, before the movie opened nationally, you'll see that it got rather mediocre receptions at press screenings. It wasn't until the pirate geeks started raving about how AWESOME THE ENDING WAS (a real facade that basically says 'nothing is resolved at all but I don't want to question what just happened because I'll come off as stupid, so I'll say I like it') that people started embracing it.
If you're blind to anything involving pirates and cannot be objective, you'll disagree with everything I said but...honestly, this movie just wasn't that good.
(And people need to stop talking about the first one like it was Citizen Kane; it was a successful Jerry Bruckheimer summer adventure movie that, due to an absolute dearth of original ideas at Disney, was chalked up to have two sequels without there initially being any plan for such an endeavor.)