Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man's Chest

It pains me to do this, it really does.  I should have preferred to keep some sort of a respectful silence on the subject of [takes deep breath] Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man's Chest.  But my search logs are nigh on full to the brim of people attracted by titular links to zombies, pirates and monkeys, and I can picture each, hopes dashed, trudging away into teh intarweb, disappointment etched upon their rugged, proletarian features.

You see, I entered the Vue/Omni/Warner Village/whatever it is this week Cinema in Edinburgh, agog with anticipation and cursing myself for not having had the foresight to look out a pirate hat or a small, portable monkey.  And I left downcast, sore of back and a little glad it was finished.

The film is too long.  Faaaaar too long at seven minutes shy of two and a half hours.  I don't often say this, but director Gore Verbinski needed some strong producers to tell him "you don't need the two 'we can do Apocalypse Now, journeying upriver in the swamp' scenes, the cannibal island sequence is overblown and protracted, the opening is weak, unnecessary to the plot, and serves only to set up a single visual joke."  He has enough of those jokes - Depp yet again shows how superb he is as a comedy actor - for a hilarious 100 minute movie.  But the extra 43 minutes make it drag more than a little.

It rather reminded me of another occasion, when an excellent first movie saw me scratching at the door of the sequel, eagerly awaiting a worthy sequel.  But that film - Matrix: Repetitions, or Matrix: Regurgitations, or Matrix: What Would Baudrillard Do? or whatever it was called - was an unworthy successor, and so was this.

Yes, there are plenty of good jokes, although they milk the piratical comedy duo too hard. One Woody-Harrelson-in-Cheers-says-something-terribly-erudite joke works well.  But they are done repeatedly, and the setup of the characters is inconsistent: instead of seeing him as an occasional, comedy idiot-savant, we end up wnodering seriously just how well-read is the (supposedly illiterate) one-eyed pirate Ragetti?

The enemies are too monstrous.  Only Tom Hollander is of human scale.  It is hard to see a charismatic or vaguely proportionate threat from a 1000-ton kraken, a Scottish/Welsh/Dutch bloke in a squid mask, a hammerhead shark, or a terrifying, ermm, hermit crab.

Jack Sparrow is supposed to be a really, really great pirate who appears not to be at times: look at the way he steals the ship in the first movie.  He is also supposed to be phenomenally selfish but - when it comes to the clinch - capable of being rather decent and heroic in a drunken, philandering, exasperating and exasperated way: a roll of the eyes and a dive into the dock to save the girl.  But here he does a number of the most evil acts imaginable, attempting to condemn large numbers of innocent bystanders to horrendous suffering.  And he does so incompetently: at one point we see him, effectively, as a giant comedy kebab, running around looking foolish.  So much for: "That's got to be the best pirate I've ever seen...So it would seem."

The fight scenes try too hard.  The three-cornered duel on a rolling waterwheel was ridiculous, and ruined any suspension of disbelief (although it did allow one fairly good - if a little too zany - double-take visual joke.  The Leviathan fight goes on foooorreeevvveeerrrr, and soon throws away tension by making the outcome of each round inevitable.  At least it finally reminds you what this is: a very, very high budget Sinbad movie.  With some very, very bad blue-screening.

Captain Jack had better play a big part in the next one, because Orlando "Honest, I'm Tougher Than Aragorn" Bloom is a black hole of interest, sucking up any life occurring on screen when he appears.  I am a big fan of Keira Knightley, but she isn't going to carry an action movie.  A lot is going to rest on the shoulders of Geoffrey Rush.

Tom Hollander, as the wicked but clearly lost East India Trading Company representative, was fun, and he gets to play a very bad Mr Collins opposite Knightley's Elizabeth (Bennet, not Swann).  Bill Nighy does his best, which is always good, but his CGI appearance makes that rather difficult: essentially he is voicing a cartoon, with the resulting separation from his character obvious on occasion.  Jack Davenport is rather good - even better than in the first, I would say - and with a nicely sardonic, ambiguous character.

Most of all, there is nothing nearly as fun as this:

Jack Sparrow: You, sailor.
Mr. Gibbs: Cotton, sir.
Jack Sparrow: Mr. Cotton. Do you have the courage and fortitude to follow orders and stay true in the face of danger and almost certain death?
[pause]
Jack Sparrow: Mr. Cotton. Answer, man.
Mr. Gibbs: He's a mute, sir. Poor devil had his tongue cut out, so he trained the parrot to talk for him. No one's yet figured how.
Jack Sparrow: Mr. Cotton's... parrot. Same question.
Parrot: [squawk] Wind in the sails. Wind in the sails.
Mr. Gibbs: Mostly, we figure, that means 'yes.'