Some Good Comedy Sequences

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 2006)

I finally saw this at a theatre this weekend. I love movies but hate theaters. But I was in the middle of three days of eight and under fastpitch softball, it was 95 degrees at the nearly shade-less softball complex, and the small town theater had $4 matinée prices. About midway through I got a headache but that could have been from the 32 ounce slushy rather than the film. Considering this has been out for five weeks there was fairly large crowd in the theater.
Basically it was an entertaining film if not as good as the first one. It was really too long (most of the cannibal scenes should have been cut as the film really dragged at this point).
The assembly of the film was horrible, making the story hard to follow and failing to build up even a tiny bit of suspense. But it works fine as a comedy.
Knightley's character has less screen time than the original and her stuff is more silly than funny. You could say the same for Depp and Bloom as there is more focus on the supporting cast (a good thing in the cases of Davy Jones and the bubbling pair of Black Pearl crewman-a bad thing otherwise).
While certainly better than recent CG mega-movie like "King Kong", the unprecedented attendance is hard to understand. These computer generated action sequences are getting very old and losing their effectiveness with seasoned viewers ("20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" did scarier stuff using rubber tentacles almost 50 years ago) and the CG scenery backgrounds are little better than the old painted backdrops.