Yo Ho No.

Rating: Null/10 (23 July 2006)

I just know my daughter is going to kill me if she ever reads this. Normally a young woman of impeccably British cynicism and with barely an iota of emotion, she goes completely to pieces at the sight of Johnny Depp. And Orlando Bloom. Put them both in one movie and she's positively girly. So of course she thinks Pirates of the Caribbean 2; Dead Man's Chest is quite the most wonderful thing since, well, Pirates of the Caribbean 1. And I don't. I'm only giving it 5 stars so she doesn't leave home.
Yes Johnny Depp is very nice to look at, (what the hell is he using on his skin? It's just beautiful..) and he is faultless and entertaining again in this his second outing as Captain Jack Sparrow. And Keira Knightly is lissome and lovely and feisty, and Orlando Bloom is, umm, Orlando Bloom. Sweet, inoffensive, very straight and loyal as Will Turner, and struggling hard not to be completely overwhelmed by Depp. The effects are awesome of course, Bill Nighy is excellent, Naomie Harris is good value, Tom Hollander does "prissy" so well etc etc.
This is an "Oh look there's" movie, as in "Oh look, there's thingy, wasn't he in......er you know, that TV thing, and oh look there's what's his name.." You get the idea? But this movie is half an hour too long, way, way too complicated and not as good as the first one, which I thoroughly enjoyed, mostly for its complete honesty. Yes, it was cheesy, but it was high class cheese. Hand-made farm organic Stilton. This is Kraft cheese-food slices. And it's bordering on the cynical, in its efforts to milk every last drop of interest out of the audience. And I'm afraid it lost my interest way before the end. Trilogies rarely work for me, although I'm sure the bankers love them. The only trilogy I've ever seen where part 3 was as good as part 1 is The Lord of the Rings. Somehow I doubt that Pirates 3 will be up to the standard of The Return of the King. Tell me, have they fired every film and story editor in Hollywood? Truly there were at least four places in the last third of the movie where I reached for my handbag thinking "Well that must be it," but no, it dragged on into another scene. And another. And another.
More is NOT better. Sometimes less is better. This film could have lost at least 20 minutes, maybe thirty, and it would have been a far better movie for it. We would still have loved Johnny Depp, we would still have gasped at all the clever CGI stuff, we would still have put our hands in our wallets and gone to see part 3. In fact, I'm less inclined to see part 3 after sitting through 150 minutes of this one with my legs crossed. It's ironic that cinema owners love these super sized blockbusters because they fill the cash registers with money from pop corn stuffing and soda slurping kids, then the movie-going experience is ruined because every few minutes after the first hour and a half, someone gets up and clambers all over you to get to the bathroom. They should sell incontinence pants in the foyer, not sodas.
I'm not the first person to note that the current tendency for movies to go on and on and on and.... is just way too much. King Kong, Superman Returns, X Men 3. All way too long (although the latter was worth sitting through just to see Hugh Jackman finally take his shirt off.) Enough already!