Essentially unnecessary

Rating: 5/10 (4 June 2011)

'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl' was fresh and funny, a mixture of pirate adventure, comedy and horror film; but it's sequel, 'Dead Man's Chest', only illustrates the point that most sequels would have been better off unmade. Specatacular special effects come to completely dominate the film, mostly because of the essentially uninteresting (and, in the way of all middle-parts of trilogies, unresolved) plot; above all else, for all the visual inventiveness, there's nothing new here, just an endless re-interpretation of the same jokes and characters that sparkled in the first movie but which here just pall. The odd moment made me smile; but this is an overlong, and essentially unnecessary film.