The Dead man is bloated

Rating: 5/10 (10 July 2006)

I wanted to like this movie; I really liked the first one. But the screenplay is so bloated and confused that it seems like it was made up as they went along. The first third of the movie is completely unnecessary; the adventures of the crew with a group of natives has nothing at all to do with the overall plot. A visit to a lady that supposedly can help them does not result in any actual information being given to the characters that they don't already know (although the audience don't know all of it, they could have cut those scenes and had an existing character exposition to Will and the audience). The scenes of Elizabeth catching up with the rest of the principles appear to be tacked on just so we wouldn't forget that she's in the movie too.
So while the action sequences and humor are actually pretty good, there is so much dead time between them due to pointless (and at times, contradictory) scenes of melodrama and exposition that they could have probably cut the film down to 90 minutes or so and had a pretty good summer movie. As it stands, it's a bloated 2 1/2 hour mess that actually seems a lot longer than that.