Expect little and you will receive

Rating: 6/10 (7 July 2006)

Those who expected little from this second installment of Pirates will be. Completely justified.
Dead Man's Chest suffers from sequel-syndrome, with an extraordinarily convoluted plot, and jokes that seem to scream (in an increasingly hysterical voice) "Remember the first one? Remember how funny it was?!?!"
Not to say that the movie in itself was all bad. Certainly it meets the requirements of a fun summer blockbuster, but after the overwhelming success of Black Pearl, this seems depressingly inadequate. With three years between the first and second movie, all the good jokes were already feeling hackneyed enough without being dusted off and reused. One could only moan "not another rum joke Please not another rum joke."
Most viewers, of course, will go simply to see Johnny Depp  but it seems Gore Verbinski decided this was not enough reason to shift focus from the overly-dramatic Will Turner onto Jack Sparrow. Jack appears to have (shockingly) gotten even less screen time than in the first film  and what he does get is, for the most part, poorly written. In the scenes where he was given new material to work with  new jokes and character development  Johnny Depp is absolutely extraordinary, but these scenes were too few and far between to save the film.
In true sequel-style, the ending will, indeed, leave you cheering and waiting expectantly for the last installment, but this fabulous last 30 min. doesn't really justify 2 hours of drudgery. There is much potential here, but to capitalize on it the film would have had to try harder to stand on its own - not relying so heavily on Curse of the Black Pearl  a true sequel instead of a half-hearted clone.