DOWN IN FRONT: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Rated PG-13

by Dan Dunkle

     There was a point early on when I was watching “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” when I thought, “This is excellent. Home run.” But this is one of those rare instances where a movie starts strong and then ends poorly, leaving me unable to get behind it.

     Johnny Depp reprises his role as Captain Jack Sparrow for this sequel to the highly-successful original. In this movie, he is being hunted by the one-and-only Davy Jones of Davy Jones’ locker fame (played by a computer and the wonderful British actor Bill Nighy). Depp owes Davy Jones some sort of debt, but I found it difficult to follow some of the pirate mythology. Hopefully you’ll have better luck.

     The squid-like Davy Jones runs a sort of ghost ship filled with monstrous sailors that come in various forms. One might look a bit like seaweed and another seems to have a star fish stuck to his head. In their arsenal is the mighty sea monster, the Kraken, which resembles the revved-up modern answer to the squid from “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

     Meanwhile, good old Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and his lady love Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) find themselves under arrest and facing an appointment with the hangman unless they agree to track down Captain Jack and acquire his magic compass.

     All of this is well and good. There are some very funny scenes in the movie, especially when Captain Jack finds himself on the menu at a feast being put on by some island cannibals and must attempt an escape while still tied to the spit they planned to roast him on.

     I was laughing and munching popcorn. No problem.

     When the Kraken started destroying ships with its mighty tentacles I thought, “This is awesome!” It was close enough to beloved Ray Harryhausen monster movies like “Jason and the Argonauts” to get this geek excited.

     However... there are a few problems.

     At some point in the third act, I had this feeling that the story was just starting to drag. Nothing seemed to be resolving itself and it just kept going on and on.

     The characters, I thought, were starting to seem a bit forced. The actors, who were not really the big shots they are today when the first one was filmed, didn’t seem to be having fun with it anymore. Depp wasn’t giving quite the A-game he gave in the first one, but in his defense, I think the writing was a bit weaker too.

     Then, without warning and without bringing the story to any kind of real conclusion, they rolled the end credits. I realized as I sat there trying to deal with my disappointment that they were just using this movie as a bridge between the first one and the third installment, which will complete the “trilogy.”

     I don’t like it that because this is part of a trilogy they decided it didn’t need to be complete in and of itself. Every movie should have a beginning, a middle and a satisfying conclusion. They’re going to leave this hanging and then, two years from now, or whenever they release the next one, I’m not going to be able to remember what happened in this one. They did this with the “Matrix” and quickly proved that the “Matrix” would have been better off as just one movie.

     “But Dan, what about ‘Lord of the Rings?’” Yeah, I know, but the only one of those films that really lacked an ending was the first one, and I didn’t really like that all that much at that particular moment in time. Plus, the other thing to keep in mind is that J.R.R. Tolkein wrote the three “Lord of the Rings” novels originally as one massive book, so he obeyed the rules I’m setting forth here (“Star Wars” was another trilogy that originally started out as one long story in the writer’s hands and later got divided into several parts).

     I also would argue that this is not really a trilogy. A trilogy is when you set out to tell a long story in three movies, but you plan it that way from the beginning. The first “Star Wars” series is probably the best example. When you do a movie and discover that it’s been really successful and then decide to do two more, I think that’s more a matter of doing successive sequels.

     This would have been so much better if they had wrapped everything up nice and neat and kept it under two hours. This was two 1/2 hours long, and came a week after I sat through two hours and 45 minutes of “Superman.” And don’t even get me started on “King Kong,” which was very good, but takes all day to watch on DVD. Why are movies so dang long these days?

     However, I’m sure it will make a whole heap of money and the sequel too, so at least Hollywood’s happy.