Avast! Craploads of characters, but Jack keeps some of it in check.

Rating: 8/10 (7 July 2006)

Ah, Pirates. The movie of the summer, I'd imagine. Regardless of whether this thing is going to get good or bad reviews, people are going to go in droves to this thing, and they should.
The best parts of the movie were self explanatory, really. For me, and for most people it was Depp again, but I saw that coming. This seemed to be another one of those "The movie is alright but his performance makes it grand" thing, only not so much as say Secret Window or the Ninth Gate where he was 'making' those movies completely good. This one had a strong cast, but at the same time had a whole huge load of a supporting cast, and could make anyone paying half attention to the story easily confused (like the person sitting beside me).
It had some great CGI things with the evil pirates from Davy Jones' ship, and the little story involved with Will Turner and Bootstrap Bill was introduced quite well, because it gave both the viewer, and the people involved that "out of nowhere" feeling, so it was easily identifiable. They do tend to pack a whole crapload into the first hour or so, just to have that 'wrapping up' feeling to make sure that you're following along from the previous film, which seemed to be the same as the first hour of Superman Returns (which was only 4 minutes longer. Howabout that!). But like Superman Returns, the rest of the movie following that hour is smooth sailing until it's hang-ending that you can see coming from a mile away if you're paying full attention to the film and not just staring at Captain Jack and waiting for him to do something funny. Oh, and Keira Knightley's in this movie too. I forgot that. She's cute, and mostly lost in the shuffle behind all of the other massive amounts of characters that are there as a seemingly effortless (but actually not quite) plan of wrapping everything up in the third film.
The one thing I do like above everything else about number two is how much darker it was. It wasn't the happy, almost always sunny movie the first movie was, this was something a bit darker, a bit scarier, and a bit uglier. That's how it should be, and they pulled that off beautifully, savvy?