Not bad, but too long, and over the top

Rating: 7/10 (7 July 2006)

As a large fan of the original movie, I was pretty excited to see this sequel when it came out. A large group of friends and I attended the midnight release, and overall we were a bit disappointed.
It is my personal opinion of the first pirates movie that had Johnny Depp not been cast as Captain Jack Sparrow, it would have been abysmal. It was his incredible acting talent that made the first one the success. And while the swashbuckling, makeup-wearing captain is one of the most alluring factors of Dead Man's Chest; I believe he was unable to overcome the shortcomings of the second movie as he did in the first.
Dead Man's Chest did three things I'm sick of Hollywood doing: 1) Relied too much on popular actors to draw crowds; 2) Went with a plot driven by lots of action and special effects, while attempting to mask a poor storyline; and 3) In typical trilogy fashion, sacrificed a decent ending in exchange for setting up the next movie.
While granted, this movie is going to make an enormous amount of money at the box office, most likely more than the first, that doesn't make it a better movie. There were too many sequences that were simply outrageous - the bone prison rolling down hills; the multiple fights against the giant squid thing; the entire fight sequence over the chest and how everyone ends up in the same place (how convenient).
Not only did I find myself checking my watch on multiple occasions, I noticed a large amount of people doing the same throughout the movie. While other movies of extreme length are done so to fit in a large amount of plot in a small out of time (i.e. LOTR), Pirates 2 has too many sequences that are simply too long and drawn out. One particular scene that angered me was the fight sequence between Depp, Bloom and Davenport (Norrington). During this fight, Knightley does nothing but kick and scream like a typical female, which is nothing like the strong and independent Swann we saw in the first and most of the second movie.
Overall, the movie was entertaining and fun to watch, but unlike the first one, I don't plan on seeing this again until it comes out on DVD.