Shiver Me Timbers! Captain Jack Returns in a Lumbering Adventure That Improves in the Second Half

Rating: 7/10 (9 July 2006)

Johnny Depp's preening cheekiness as Captain Jack Sparrow continues to be the invaluable glue that holds together this action-packed, over-the-top movie, the second in a trilogy inspired by the well-loved, nearly forty year-old ride in Disneyland. The jam-packed story picks up relatively soon after the point where the last one left off with spunky Elizabeth Swann about to marry adventurer Will Turner. Complications come in the form of British East India Trading Company's Lord Cutler Beckett, who charges the couple with conspiring to help Sparrow escape from the company's clutches. Death is their fate unless they can secure Sparrow's magical compass for Beckett. Sparrow has troubles of his own as he has sold his soul to the legendary dawn-of-the-dead pirate, Davy Jones, fabled captain of the Flying Dutchman, in exchange for the right to command his vessel, the Black Pearl. Sparrow's one option is to find the key to a chest containing Jones' still-beating heart.
The story lines eventually collide but not before the main characters run into a voodoo woman, Tia Dalma, full of mystical advice on how to get the key; Elizabeth's jilted swain, Commodore James Norrington, out for revenge against Will; Will's lost-soul father, Bootstrap Bill Turner, somewhere between life and death; and a mammoth, octopus-like sea monster named Kraker. After a shaky start with far too much exposition, director Gore Verbinski gets the momentum finally going in the second hour with heart-racing action escalating in both scope and absurdity, although screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio tend to layer all the developments in a most convoluted manner. Despite the pacing problems, what I do like about the film is its persistently irreverent tone and the way death is treated not as the final end but as a relative inconvenience. From my perspective, this is what makes the movie's spirit come alive for a contemporary viewer.
Beyond Depp's devilishly clever performance, the real star is unsurprisingly the CGI-generated special effects, whether it's Jones and his ocean-morphed crew of half men/half sea creatures (the hammerhead shark is a particularly creepy figure to watch); Kraker and its engulfing destruction (though this gets repetitive in the story); or the variety of memorable action set pieces, such as the Black Pearl crew swinging in a ravine to escape their suspended spherical cages, or concurrently, Sparrow precariously maneuvering a pole where he inadvertently becomes part of a fruit shish kebob. My favorite set piece is the runaway waterwheel on the island where Will, Norrington and Sparrow are preoccupied with their swashbuckling and the search for the chest. The audacious silliness of these action sequences is what keeps the movie afloat.
Both Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom return from the first film as Elizabeth and Will. Looking beautiful, even disguised as a boy, Knightley has been promoted into more of an action role here and handles her part with aplomb. Bloom is still a relatively colorless presence but fulfills the heroic dimensions of the part almost by default. As Davy Jones, Bill Nighy is able to create an intriguing character underneath the CGI-generated visage of octopus tentacles, and in a tribute to Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", has a great scene where he plays the numerous keys of a pipe organ all at once. Granted, at 150 minutes, the epic movie does run too long for the story it tells, and the lumbering series of climaxes seems excessive. Regardless, it's still grand fun thanks to Depp and the oozing, barnacle-encrusted realism of the CGI effects.