Failed to meet my low expectations

Rating: 4/10 (10 July 2006)

The first movie was a lot of fun. Overall not a great film, but an okay one made really good by the performance of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. It was an amazing performance, deserving of an Oscar nomination, but there is really nowhere to go with the character. I knew this going into Pirates 2, so I had no expectation that it would be nearly as good as the first movie. I had hoped that this movie would be a simple fun goofy romp that would essentially be the continuing adventures of Captain Jack. Unfortunately, this movie could not achieve that simple feat.
The first two thirds of the movie drags on like a church sermon on stewardship. The movie spends way too much time following the adventures of Will and Elizabeth, and it seems to take forever to get Captain Jack into the story. The problem seems to be that the producers only had enough story to make one solid sequel, but of course they were greedy and decided to stretch it into a trilogy. The result is that this middle film is essentially a two and a half hour setup for the third installment. Overall there is about an hour of this movie that advances the story, the rest is just unnecessary and hokey action sequences that play to the lowest common denominator. The entire storyline involving the island with the tribe of cannibals did not advance the story at all and just served up some lowbrow humor.
There was another scene where Captain Jack, Will, and Commodore Norrington engaged in a three sided sword fight that I think lasted for about 100 of the 163 minutes. When you are watching this scene, you know that no one is going to get hurt, you are just waiting for it to be over so that we can go back to the story. This fight scene include the participants riding a big wooden water wheel down a hill. I can't help but picture Jerry Bruckheimer saying to Gore Verbinski "You know what would be cool, lets have somebody ride a big wheel down a hill, that would be cool. Wait, how about if we put a bunch of people in a spherical cage and roll that down a hill. It sure is cool when people roll down hill." There were also a couple of action packed sequences with a sea monster, when it seemed that generic pirates came out of nowhere just to die two seconds later (Bruckheimer should have this tactic trademarked, because nobody does it better). Unfortunately the sea monster could not snag the annoying parrot or any of the other supporting pirates who always seemed to poke there heads out from the debris after all the excitement has settled down.
When it comes down to it, I probably would have been willing to pay my 6.50 to see a one hour setup to the third movie, rather than have it stretched to two and a half hours and expect to actually see a movie.