Arrrrrr! It be a whole lot worse than the first one, me hearty.

Rating: 3/10 (20 February 2007)

Johnny Depp returns as Jack Sparrow, pirate and captain of The Black Pearl who, after making a deal with the supernatural scourge of the seven seas, Davey Jones, faces a bleak future as one of the undead crew-members of The Flying Dutchman. His only chance of avoiding this terrible fate is to try and locate a chest containing the heart of Davey Jones. But even with the help of Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightly), and his loyal crew, the quest will be a perilous one.
With an amazing cast and amazing production values, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is simply bursting at the seams with amazing stunts, amazing special effects and amazing action set-pieces. But what is most amazing about this film is that director Gore Verbinski still somehow fails to deliver a finished product that is equal to the sum of its parts.
This sequel to his own 2003 blockbuster, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man's Chest is an overlong, incomprehensible mess of a movie, which has all of the right elements but no decent story on which to hang them. The dreadfully structured and convoluted plot jumps from one event to another with seemingly no attempt at a coherent narrative and totally wastes its wealth of great characters.
At nearly two-and-a-half hours long, the film pads out its extremely ill-conceived script with endless, and ultimately very dull, fight scenes and a glut of admittedly impressive, but often unnecessary, CGI effects. In fact, if as much effort had been put into crafting a decent tale as was obviously put into realising the movie's monstrous villains, Dead Man's Chest might have been a whole lot better.
As it stands, though, I'd rather be keelhauled than be made to watch this bilge again.