Chum

Rating: 3/10 (28 February 2007)

I'll get the few words of praise I have for this out front: the center of this, visually and narratively, is the 3-way tussle on the rolling mill wheel. It is a clever way of referencing the experience of being on one of Disney's theme park rides. We see the action from outside the wheel, from inside the wheel as though we're running within, from a right angle to the axis, as though we're fixed to the imaginary axle, etc. ... Pretty good stuff.
However, this idea plainly chafes against the rest of the movie which is dreary, dark, nihilistic and NOT appropriate for the age of the target audience. Verbinski and Co. should've stuck with PG content, but unwisely tried to rope in the PG-13 crowd...at the cost of eliminating the insouciant fun that pervaded the first film.
And worst of all, the rest of the movie is just filler...stuffing pulled out of other cinematic vocabularies, notably "...Temple of Doom", "Waterworld", "Yellowbeard", characters taken from the "Star Wars" lexicon who are given life from a blend of makeup and CGI.
Stick with the first film...none of this new stuff is necessary...