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PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST (**)
Movie Review by: Jim "Good Old JR" Rutkowski
Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Written by:
Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie
Starring:
Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley
Running time: 145 minutes, Released: 07/07/06.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of adventure violence, including frightening images.
Epics come about by necessity. The material demands it. A story is too big and too grand to contain within the usual boundaries, and so an epic is born. "The Lord of the Rings," for example, became an epic film trilogy because its story could only be told in that form. Epics don't come about through sheer willpower, by someone deciding to make an epic and then stuffing a weak story with a lot of junk. Do that and you don't get an epic, just cinematic water torture on the order of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest."

This second installment in the "Pirates" trilogy is more than the usual bad or even numbingly horrible movie. It's an amalgam of many of the modern cinema's worst tendencies and modern filmmaking's most unfortunate misconceptions. The film has an epic scale without an epic story, epic characters, epic ideas or epic emotions. The conversations are without wit and often without purpose. Much of the acting consists of mugging and empty gestures. Scenes are stretched out for no reason but to give the illusion of importance, so that the story is buried under rubble. Worst of all, director Gore Verbinski doesn't seem to understand the difference between motion and action. He is more traffic cop than film director.

It's an important difference. Motion is just violence and tumult happening onscreen. Action is violence and tumult that actively advances the story. Of recent movies, "Mission: Impossible III" has motion, while Peter Jackson's "King Kong" mostly consists of action scenes. In "Pirates," whenever there's a battle, or a fight, or a chase scene, the story comes to a dead stop while the filmmakers devise clever, active ways for absolutely nothing to happen. The slightest incident is pumped up into a 10- or 15-minute segment. In one scene, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) has to escape from native islanders who want to use him in a ritual sacrifice. The movie has one inventive stunt (he's attached to a pole and finds himself stuck between two mountains), but by the time that stunt arrives, its moment has long past.

As Captain Jack the Pirate, Depp seems to have lost some of the Keith Richards swagger that he had in the first installment, but he's still game and willing to mug his way through the picture. That's fine. The problem is that he has nowhere to take the character -- it's a self-contained dead end -- while the filmmakers seem to have decided, this time out, to take Captain Jack seriously. It does Depp no justice to take the amusing caricature he's created and try to give it a complicated moral nature. Observe how uncomfortable, how torn in two directions Depp looks in his heart-to-heart conversations with Keira Knightley, as he tries to play a scene and remain Captain Jack at the same time.
The story is an intentional tangle designed not to be untied until the end of the third installment, which arrives next year. Elizabeth (Knightley) and Will (Orlando Bloom) are about to be married when they're arrested for having sheltered Captain Jack from the authorities. Will is temporarily released on the condition that he find Captain Jack and retrieve a special compass. If he succeeds, he and Elizabeth will be free.

Meanwhile, Jack is in pursuit of a ghost ship, led by Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), who has an octopus-like face with sensitive tentacles and feelers. He heads a handsome crew that includes a hammer-headed officer and Stellan Skarsgard as Will's father, who has rubbery barnacles growing on his face. Imagine the torment for a sensitive soul, to be forced to sail for all eternity with costume rejects from "Star Trek."

The lead actors are not to be blamed. Bloom, a popular whipping boy of late, makes a fine, vigorous young leading man, and Knightley has the great advantage of intelligence. She brings an alert energy to her scenes, but most of the time she's the only alert thing in them. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio's script is torturous. When characters have nothing to say to each other, they write them fake-clever banter in which they still say nothing, but leer and smirk while doing so. Purely functional scenes, as when a witch (Naomie Harris) imparts necessary plot information, are stretched beyond the snapping point. Do we need to be taken into the witch's inner sanctum? Do we need to see that she has blue teeth, and is that a style choice or a product placement for Bluetooth technology?

Everything is an occasion for a scene. So when a long boat approaches an island, the movie doesn't cut to show the characters having arrived. Instead, we're treated to an interlude of meaningless banter between two rustics dragging the boat to shore, as though Elliott and Rossio were Shakespeare and these were the grave diggers in "Hamlet." The inescapable conclusion to reach is that the goal was to make a long movie. But that goal is simply incompatible with also making good movie. Good long movies are long because they have to be. They're not made of air.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST © 2006 Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
All Rights Reserved

Review © 2006 Alternate Reality, Inc.

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