Dead Man's Chest is great entertainment

Rating: 8/10 (2 July 2006)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
reviewed by Sam Osborn
rating: 3.0 out of 4
More, more, more seems to be the theme running through Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. There's more adventure, more violence, more pirates, and more myth. Not to mention that two and a half hour running length. But while Superman Returns may have dragged some in its 150 minutes, Pirates hurtles along at a pace only expected from the offspring of a Disneyland theme-ride, rarely slowing for piddling bits of nonsense like, oh say, story. Of course, story's not the point of these flicks and it surely doesn't have to be. There's entertainment enough to be had without all the other hodgepodge. And Pirates 2, for all its expansion, manages to dodge common sequelitis pitfalls. It doesn't overdose on a memorable character from the original (cough, Matrix Revolutions, cough) or over-broaden it's scope (cough, Matrix Reloaded,cough). Dead Man's Chest is a continuation of the original Pirates adventure, just with a couple extra unmarked sails tacked onto its deck.
The plot has something to do with ole' Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, of course) and his debt to Davy Jones (Bill Nighy). Debts, as we've all learned by now, are not things Mr. Sparrow is most proficient at repaying. The Dead Man's Chest factors in as it holds Mr. Jones' beating heart, which was ravaged by the likes of a lady whom he loved in the past. The English Navy blowhards also seem to be after the chest, and blackmail William Turner (Orlando Bloom) to seek out Capt. Jack's magic compass, which supposedly points toward the treasure. Held in a cell is Will's fiancé, Elizabeth Swan (Kiera Knightley), under charges of assisting Capt. Jack in the franchise's last swashbuckler. What it boils down to is a mottled mess of a chase to find the key to Davey Jones' chest, and avoiding his gargantuan beast, the Kraken.
The myth itself wrings deeper than the original's, with Davey Jones and his seafood cohorts rendered with an unholy amount of CGI goodness to make them squirm convincingly in all their scaly, slippery evil. But the plot doesn't hold much water, same as the first, though plot was never the point. As long as it paints a tastily mythological backdrop for our pirates to plunder, we're kept smiling. And even though the picture has all the weight of a paperclip, the franchise has at least matured since it's last time around. The mood has thickened and no longer can we tell that the film is a shameless translation of its Disneyland ride. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio take efforts to develop each of our three heroes separately, using individual sub-plots to fill in the otherwise empty molds left dry from the original. Will Turner has a family reunion with his father (Stellan Skarsgard), enslaved by Davy Jones and appearing as though he's slowly evolving into a starfish. Will's fiancé, Ms. Swan, escapes from her cell and hides as a stowaway on a trade vessel. And Jack, of course still functioning as the star of the show, develops his slimier persona with delectable cowardice and deception. Ironic that the teenagers of America have chosen Mr. Sparrow as their most prized character in film. Oh, wait, that honor instead belongs to Napoleon Dynamite. Perhaps we should be nervous about our country's future?
Anyway, along with the characters the adventure is also thickened heartily; though probably not by consequence of the writing, but instead because of the greatly inflated budget. Our friends are volleyed about the seas, facing the enormous sea monster, the Kraken, whose plunger-like tentacles crumple vessels like copy-paper. Swordplay is more indulgent too, with Verbinksi going so far as to mount a chivalric swordfight inside a huge, rolling waterwheel as it bounces along the island's foliage. Verbinski juggles these stunts with ease, proving once again his film-making versatility. If you'll remember all the way back to last October (I know, in Hollywood-time nine months is an epoch) Verbinski made a quiet, gloomy little character study called The Weather Man. And before that, Verbinski also directed The Ring and Captain Jack's first adventure in 2003. Yup, this guy's the real deal. In the waterwheel sequence, Verbinski chooses not to succumb to any mere CGI trickery, and mounts a camera on the wheel's axis to show that at one point he forced Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom to swordfight on a giant spinning wooden wheel. And he's more artistic than your typical Brett Ratner-esquire director, finding a visual aesthetic perfect for a pirate's tale.
But art and pretentious critic fodder aside, Dead Man's Chest is great entertainment. It's rich and exciting and chock-full of Captain Jack-isms for high schoolers to repeat over and again. And the life of pirates is still a chunk of history that Hollywood has been unwilling to bite into for a while. Pirates of the Caribbean, for all its feathery, lightweight fun, gorges on this chunk and keeps us hooked on the adventure, waiting along with all the local eighth and ninth graders next year for the midnight showing of Captain Jack's trilogy capper.