Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

There is a single moment in which really captures the anarchic spirit that made the first film so popular and wonderful. It happens when the smart Jack Sparrow is trapped on an island where the primitive natives think him a God and plan to "free him from his body" by roasting him on an open flame. After a rescue attempt by his pals Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann goes wrong, Sparrow makes a break for it, and we see him come around a corner and barrel down a deserted beach in all his demented, arm-flapping glory as an islandful of savages follow on his heels.

This is a great moment I feel which has caught Depp's character and provides a fine example of his hilarious personality, without which this movie wouldn't have gotten very far. It's also marvelously devoid of self-consciousness, unconcerned with topping the previous stunt or special effect, a visual joke similar to Sparrow's memorable entrance in The Curse of the Black Pearl

The rest of Dead Man's Chest is largely missing this sort of flair. We get a big and complicated plot and plenty of Depp's mincing, but the movie is murky and not all that much fun. Will and Elizabeth, who were better engaging heroes and a charming couple in the first film, get to do little beyond run and fight and thus the story sends them on their way.

What seems to have been forgotten, or never realized to begin with, is that the fun of The Curse of the Black Pearl wasn't all in the action and the effects. I missed the charm of the set-up, with Bloom's swordmaker forgetting his station and winning the girl and the naîvete of his romance with Elizabeth and his rivalry with Jack Davenport's snooty Norrington. The ridiculous final showdown between all

I did not miss the exaggerated stunts and old-fashioned swashbuckling, since we get that in spades -- usually the two are combined, as in a fight scene set atop a gigantic wooden wheel rolling through the forest. But Gore Verbinski is not a standout technical filmmaker, and he rarely makes the enormous set pieces work on their own merits. I did not enjoy the scenes with the Kraken -- an enormous sea monster that swallows ships -- because the sound effects generate an impressive sense of scale, but most of the endless barrage of action just doesn't blend together. Meanwhile, the story is too convoluted to serve as an entertaining clothesline for all of this, and by about the one-hour mark my eyes started to glaze over.
Overall I would rate this movie as see only on one pretext because there are not good enough movies around to see.