Worst Sequel since the Matrix

Rating: 2/10 (6 August 2006)

This film lacked everything that made the The Curse of the Black Pearl enjoyable and an overabundance of what made it less than stellar. I enjoyed the Curse of the Black Pearl a great deal but felt it walked a fine line between realism and supernaturalism without delving too far overboard. It had abundant, well-choreographed action sequences (except the first duel between Jack & Will which was too over the top), good character interaction, a good plot, and believably ruthless pirates.
Dead Mans Chest has none of these. Characters have seemingly become more simple minded, the action sequences are too far apart and were all overly extravagant, the dialog was uninteresting, but the worst part of all had to be Davey Jones and the pirates of The Flying Dutchman.
When I first saw Bootsrap Bill with mollusks growing out of his neck, I accepted that being among the undead, perhaps this could have been reasonable. But to have Davey Jones head be an octopus, and his first mate having a hammerhead shark head was just too far removed from reality to allow me to engage in these characters and took me out of the film.
Taking the POTC franchise deeper into the realm of supernaturalism was unnecessary, and will ultimately doom the franchise. Had it been grounded more in realism, then the franchise would be able to survive even without characters like Captain Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and Elizabeth Swann. POTC could have been a franchise that contained overlapping characters, but could have focused on telling new and interesting stories and introducing new characters instead of being character dependent. But now it is stuck in having to out do the previous film in weirdness rather than focus on telling interesting stories. And that means it will have to continue with the same cast of characters.
I don't expect there to be any more POTC movies after POTC3. And I don't expect POTC3 to be any better than Dead Man's Chest. Disney has made POTC into the next Matrix trilogy. Great first film, followed by two films that were more about suckering in the audience than they were about good storytelling.