Not awful, just a long way down from "Black Pearl"

Rating: 5/10 (8 July 2006)

It's rare that I go to an opening night, but we love "Black Pearl" so much we just had to. The theater was full 20 minutes before show time, the anticipation was electric. I was expecting the audience to be as much fun as the movie.
And in a way, I was right. Once the film started rolling, the air went out of the crowd pretty fast. A slow, boring opening, followed by a rather ridiculous sequence that just provided a vehicle for Will to meet up with Jack Sparrow. You might ask how I could condemn something in a POTC movie as "implausible", but I will. The whole sequence wouldn't have been less forced if Will and Jack had bumped into each other at a Starbucks in Tampa.
It picks up somewhat after that, I suppose, but it still has more stuffed in that it needs or can competently carry. It seems they had a lot of ideas from people they couldn't say no to, so they threw it in somewhere.
Jack Sparrow was considerably less animated than in "Pearl". It looked more like someone playing Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow than the brilliantly eccentric performance of the first movie. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, well, they're still gorgeous.
Davey Jones is particularly interesting visually, as are some of the other human/sea creatures. Many of the humans are a waste, sometimes overdoing old jokes from the first movie. It's only ironic once when a pirate shows a surprising flash of educational sophistication.
This whole second movie is just a setup for the third movie, and that's not the only way it reminds me of "Star Wars". One of the creatures in particular I think ILM just pulled out some of their old work from "Return of the Jedi". Others in my clan noted similarities to Indiana Jones movies, and that some of the bad guys seem to have patterned their characters on Orcs.
Sigh. I wanted so much to love "Dead Man's Chest." And I don't hate it, just like I didn't hate "The Empire Strikes Back." But both left me unsatisfied, for a lot of similar reasons. I don't like paying full price for what's essentially an extended trailer for the next sequel. I'm disappointed when a terrific actor playing a terrific character comes out flat the second time around. (Let's hope Johnny Depp doesn't fall as far as Harrison Ford did the third time around.) And it's only a minor compensation when the character special effects are drastically improved over the first round.
Advice: See "Dead Man's Chest" but don't knock yourself out. It will be in the dollar theater soon enough.