Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Does anybody have the slightest idea what this movie is about? I know this much: There’s a chest. Inside the chest is a heart. The heart belongs to Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), a tentacled, undead, humanoid sea-beast. Somehow, whoever possesses the heart will rule the seas. But why? I’m not sure even the moviemakers know. The chest is a giant, rickety MacGuffin on which to build an endless series of effects-driven set pieces. “Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest” is loud and wearying and strangely inert, all kinetic energy but no destination — like a NASCAR race where nobody keeps score. At the end of its 2 1/2 hours, nothing has changed! The quest, such as it is, continues, as if the story were controlled by a gamer who got bored and decided to reboot.
I wasn’t wild about “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” either. Obviously Johnny Depp was inspired during its making and, out of thin air, fashioned Captain Jack Sparrow into an indelible character. The baffling, witless script was no help — he did it all on his own. As I recall, he seemed to be acting in a different movie than everybody else — and the rest of it wasn’t a movie I cared to watch. It was tortuously long, with repetitious sequence after sequence of ghost pirates slaughtering live English soldiers, which seems to me an unfair fight. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley were tragically vanilla, and Geoffrey Rush chewed the scenery, as he does.
I give both movies credit for having top-notch production design and cinematography, by Dariusz Wolski, that somehow makes the incredible look real, much like Bill Pope’s work in the “Matrix” trilogy. For me, the saddest thing is that the director, Gore Verbinski, actually has a lot of talent when he’s working on a reasonable scale: “The Ring” and “The Weather Man” are crackling entertainments with suprising depth of feeling. He hopscotches easily across genres, and he scatters evidence of his cinematic intelligence like doubloons through the bloated, soulless “Pirates” movies. Two down, one to go!