This film is just "Dead" time

Rating: 5/10 (26 October 2006)

Once upon a time, there was a summer sequel that invaded multiplexes with fire and power, crushing multiple records, leaving box office charts in shreds. That film was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. There is one interesting side note about it's success: it isn't very good. If you would like to see a bloated, overlong, and generally unentertaining expenditure of $200 million plus dollars on screen, then pony up for Dead Man's Chest. If you want to see a entertaining movie, then keep looking.
Dead Man's Chest opens some time after the conclusion of the first entry, with Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightly) on the day of their wedding. The nuptials are interrupted by Cutter Beckett (Tom Hollander), representing the East India Trading Company, who is interested in Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and is using Will and Elizabeth to reach his goals. He strikes a deal with Will: Bring him Jack and he and Elizabeth will be let go. Jack also has problems of his own: he is being chased by the legendary Davy Jones (Bill Nighy, along with some very impressive CGI), who has survived death by becoming a combo of sea beings, to pay up a dept he owes Jones: his soul. Jack is, needless to say, interested in avoiding this, so he goes in search of a relic that will give him the drop on Jones, and Will comes along for the ride, with the plan to return to save Elizabeth.
So, let's start with the good stuff: Dead Man's Chest is gorgeous to look at, beautifully photographed by Dariusz Wolski, with equally impressive production design by Rick Heinrichs. Also, the visual effects that realize Davy Jones and the crew of the Flying Dutchman, his ship, is beyond superb. The crew are realized as amalgams of creatures of the deep, and their integration with the live action photography is excellent, worthy of an Academy Award nomination at the very least. And Johnny Depp is once again fairly entertaining as Jack Sparrow, although not quite as much as the first installment.
All that leaves plenty of room for the bad stuff. If Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was overlong, then Dead Man's Chest is nearly unending. The film clocks in a two and half hours, and that is a minimum of an hour too long. The film moves at an absolute crawl, with enough extraneous material to fill two other movies. It takes forever to actually get going and the first hour is almost completely unnecessary setup, with lots of side trips off the main plot: Jack and crew ending up on an island where he is worshipped as a god and the crew are all food for the cannibalistic natives; Elizabeth trying to catch up to Will and Jack by hitching a ride on another ship and befuddling the crew; the Black Pearl recruiting a crew to help them out and meeting up with an old adversary, etc., etc. Most of this stuff just slows down the narrative and pads the film's running length without adding anything. It's more than an hour into the film before the real villains show up and the story finally gets going.
What doesn't help is that the screenplay is almost completely unable to really explain anything that is going on. Beckett wants Jack for an object he possesses, and Davy Jones wants to keep . . . something safe. The film actually explains what these characters are after, but the explanations do nothing, because I still don't know what anyone is really after in this film. Everything in Dead Man's Chest is half-explained, and I guess the fact that this is part of a two film cycle (with another sequel to follow) is supposed to give some reason as to why full information is not given out, but it just leaves audiences head's scratching. When you sit through a two and a half hour movie and still don't really understand any of the character's motivations for doing anything, it can prove to be a letdown.
Dead Man's Chest also suffers from relatively non-existent character development. Will and Elizabeth seem to have used up any depth to their characters in the first film, because they are both relative ciphers here. Their love affair has little or no passion, you don't really feel any draw to either of them, and their plight is rather uninvolving. Jack Sparrow is fun to watch at times, but his rather unbending "me for myself" attitude makes it difficult to latch onto him as a hero. Bill Nighy turns in a decent performance as Davy Jones, and while the effects used to realize him are impressive to say the least, he proves to not be a tremendously imposing villain.
In the never ending sweepstakes to separate the viewer from their cash, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest has cooked up a impressive looking spectacle that is hollow to the core and takes forever to get where it is trying to go, and once you arrive, you find that there is nothing special waiting for you.