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dir: Gore Verbinski
Hey ladies, I bet he gives most excellent head
If some films are like non-stop rollercoaster rides, this one here is the rollercoaster ride as viewed by someone on the ground. It’s an endless series of continuous action set pieces which don’t really amount to much but sure are fun to the people on board.

In this case, the go switch is stuck on the ride, the operator is too busy reading a nudie magazine to notice, and the thrills on board have evaporated as the passengers check their watches and just want to get off.

You could never accuse these flicks of lacking characters or plot. Dead Man’s Chest has enough plot for a dozen action-adventure-fantasy-pirate flicks, and enough characters for a Broadway production of Les Miserables.

At the end of the first flick, it seemed Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swan (Keira Knightley) were going to live happily ever after, with Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) having regained control of his beloved ship the Black Pearl, off to commit more dastardly piratical acts.

The beginning of the sequel finds our heroic couple stymied in their attempts to enter into the devilish contract known as marriage by evil aristocrat Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander), who works on behalf of the East India Trading Company.

Beckett threatens to execute them both unless they help him get something off of Captain Jack. It’s not fashion tips, hair-extensions or those darling pimp-like gold teeth that he wants. Oh no.

Will Turner bravely and blandly goes out into the world to track him down. Captain Jack has problems of his own, with Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), who is some kind of undead sea god, wanting to collect the debt he is owed for having given Jack the Black Pearl.

So much happens, probably of little importance, that it little warrants relating here. Almost everyone from the first film returns, which is good for all those extraneous people who were going to return to waitressing and landscaping if this acting lark didn’t pan out.

Continuing the process begun in the first flick, the makers have taken many elements of the Disney ride, common cliché myths of the seas, and reconfigured them in such a way as to delight audiences in the new millennium. In particular, the way they’ve redone the whole Davy Jones – Flying Dutchman stuff is pretty amazing. Jones’ ship and crew of the damned slowly mutate to take on more elements of the sea around them, as some of the eldest crew members become absorbed by the ship itself, devolving into coral. They’re all, with varying degrees, inspired creations.

Davy Jones himself is an amazing creation to behold. Everything looks to be CGI except for Bill Nighy’s eyes and chilling performance. He has a massive claw for a hand, some kind of spiny peg-leg, and a head that seems to be a big octopus. Visually, I think they took their inspiration from images of the (real world) pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, and redone it so as to give him tentacles instead of the trademark beard. It looks simply amazing. The CGI work on him is virtually seamless, with realistic textures and light reflection. There is a great scene where Jones is playing, Captain Nemo-like, a piano organ on his ship, using his hand and tentacles to get the job done.

He’s pretty frightening. For a Disney product, Dead Man’s Chest is admirably gruesome. There’s a scene towards the beginning where poor prisoners hanging in gibbets are attacked by crows. Eyes do not remain in their sockets for long.

Getting back to the plot, Jack’s looking for something to spare him from Davy Jones’ wrath, Will is looking for Jack, Elizabeth escapes from prison and starts looking for Jack, or Will, Davy Jones is looking for Jack, Lord Beckett is looking for all of them, and I was looking for a cold pint afterwards, I’ll tell you that for free.

Along the way of getting to where they want to get (being the place where all the set up resolves in order to start the third film to be released next year At World’s End), there are endless diversions and interruptions. Characters magically appear places just in time to interact with other characters, and I’m not talking about the magical characters. Also, lots and lots of set pieces involving things that roll.

For a film in a genre where you would think they’d focus on sword fights and ship to ship cannon action on the high seas, they spend an inordinate amount of time with characters rolling in or on contraptions on land. Whether at the mercy of cannibal savages, or a three-way swordfight atop a waterwheel, the characters can always take time out of their busy day to roll around on top of something.

And why not. But with many of these diversions and digressions, it could be said that the flick loses its focus a few times. Probably every five minutes or so. Now, I’m not one to say to others that they should follow the linear and streamlined path, being a fairly digressive and rambling person myself, but I doubt the flick would have lost much had it been trimmed a bit better and had the running time been somewhat less than two and a half hours.

It’s nice that they want to give everyone their time to shine, but it gets a bit much sometimes. Also returning from the first flick is the much beloved comedy duo of Pintel and Ragetti. Who the fuck in the name of all that is holy are they, you are asking yourself, one step away from punching in your monitor in a Hulk-like rage.

Pintle and Ragetti (Lee Arenberg and Mackenzie Crook) are included as this flick’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Vladimir and Estragon, Jay and Silent Bob. They act almost as a chorus commenting on the proceedings, but also play a role in everything that goes on.

They are also given, in an example of the strange amount of latitude the writers were given on this sequel, some amusing dialogue completely beyond the bounds of what you’d expect in such a flick. One of the lines delivered by Mackenzie Crook, who many might remember as maladjusted oddball Gareth from The Office, had me guffawing out loud, which, as all of you must know, is extremely rare in a cinema, but all too common at funerals.

Instead of having character development, since there’s practically nowhere for these characters to go, the film exhibits several occasions of the phenomenon I’ll refer to as the ‘heel turn’. The phrase refers to something done in the highbrow and intellectual world of professional wrestling to keep character conflicts interesting. Whenever the producers wanted to jazz things up a bit, they’d make a ‘babyface’ wrestler (a good guy) almost randomly change their character to a ‘heel’ (bad guy), or vice versa. Long running dramatic genre shows also use the heel turn, taken to its ridiculous extreme in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (especially), where almost all of the major characters ended up ‘evil’, if only for short periods of time before seeing the light again.

Here, there are at least three heel turns that I could count, though one of them was so obvious that it hardly warrants labelling. Just to be clear, these aren’t issues of redemption towards the light or seduction to the dark side. There are abrupt actions carried out by characters mostly out of nowhere, defending or betraying people in ways that don’t make a lot of sense. Still it’s all done in the spirit of fun, so what does it matter. No one comes to these films for deftly plotted thematic intricacies and deeply characterised ethical ponderings.

I mean, I do, but then again I’m not entirely normal.

As a standalone film, it doesn’t stand alone that well, but it probably doesn’t matter, since it’s really meant to be a bridge between its first and third instalments. The question I ask myself after watching this is whether anything really matters that much anymore.

There’s so much going on that presumably, audiences are either meant to be able to pick and choose what they like as if it were a smorgasbord buffet, or be completely desensitised by the constant flow of stimuli to the point where thought doesn’t occur until afterwards, and in that case it’s just to say “wow, that was a fun ride.”

Look, the studio and the producers really lucked upon a goldmine when they created the character Jack Sparrow and gave it to Johnny Depp to run with. Everything else is either a cherry on top or a mild diversion until Jack reappears on screen.

The film’s strengths include its sometimes witty script, Stellen Skarsgard as Will’s father Bootstrap Bill, good to great CGI, a fearsome villain in Davy Jones, and Johnny Depp. The film’s weaknesses include too many characters, torturous plotting, the entire pointless sequence on the cannibal island, and the stupid three-way fight between Jack, Will and the former Commander Norrington (Jack Davenport).

You decide. If you hated the first one, you’re not going to like this. It’s like a concentrated version of the first. The third, if even more concentrated, should be able to explode the retinas and mutate the DNA of audience members with its awesome power.

As for the ending of this flick, ending as it does on a cliffhanger of gargantuan proportions, I have to say it took me completely by jaw-dropping surprise. But I didn’t really understand how it could be at all possible, even within the realms of the fantastical that these films inhabit. I’m sure it’ll all make sense or not matter at all, come May 2007.

7 times I have asked men with an earring in their right ear whether the earring means they’re a pirate, to which they reply “Kinda” out of 10

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“Life is cruel. Why should the afterlife be any different?” Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.