Rich Special Effects, Sometimes Entertaining, Too Long

Rating: 6/10 (24 July 2006)

Immediate reaction was I was wasting a beautiful afternoon watching a pirate movie which is only about half as entertaining as (recent DVD release) Yellowbeard.
Dead Man's Chest is yet another film turning to moments of crushing boredom as it drags through scenes which really answer the question "at what point does brilliant become passe?" The first Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Peral was pretty good. This I had high hopes for, but found myself suspecting Dead Man's Chest was going to become a marketing vehicle for a whole new theme park of pirate rides.
This isn't to say there aren't some good bits, I rather think Bill Nighy as Davy Jones delivers a delectable amount of menace, but Bill's an outstanding actor (see him in Love Actually or Girl in the Cafe.) The rest really fit into B movies in terms of credibility. Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, however, is unconvincing as a pirate captain. He strikes me as a twenty-something in charge of a ship of 40 somethings. (Might this be a parallel to the way today's businesses are managed?) Perhaps Tim Curry could have reprised his Long John Silver from the Muppet caper.
All in all, the viewer should know by now that PotC is another in a series of films with the second and third installments largely done at the same time to form a serial. There will be the culmination (one hopes) of this buccaneering (without ever actually looting one Spanish galleon of a single piece of eight) featuring Keith Richards as somebody'd father in 2007. Cheers to the juniour pirates who enjoy this sort of thing. I think I'll pass next summer and see something else.