Cutting a good trailer is as much an art as the creation of the film itself. Selecting the right moments, the pacing, the score, these are all tasks that if done right way can make the difference between a big opening weekend and a small one. The trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is paced about right for a two minute trailer. Extend all of that mayhem and action into a two hour and thirty minute film and what you end up with is a slightly too long film designed to amp up the action and hook you in to seeing the third and final act of the franchise.
Opening with the thwarted marriage ceremony of Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightly) and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) this Pirates revolves around not just the myths of the sea and piracy but also around the rise of the East India Trading company and the changing nature of the world in general. Arrested by Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) for their parts in freeing Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), the love birds are separated by Beckett’s offer to Will: get Sparrow’s compass by offering him a full pardon, and convince him to become a privateer for England and Beckett will set Elizabeth free.
Complications, of course, ensue, not the least of which is Jack’s devil’s bargain with Davy Jones. Jones (Bill Nighy under an obscene amount of make-up and CGI effects to turn him into the half-man, half-squid) raised the Black Pearl from the sea’s depths and allowed Jack 13 years as her captain in exchange for his soul and 100 years of crewing on Jones’ ship The Flying Dutchman. The crew of the Dutchman is, I think, one of this film’s weaknesses: while the transition of the doomed crew of the Pearl turned into elegantly rendered walking skeletons in the moonlight the Dutchman’s crew is grossly biological, each encrusted with barnacles, part fish, or walking reef. What else is grossly biological is the kraken, the giant squid at Davy’s beck and call which is capable of dragging a ship whole to the black depths of the sea. Imagine calimari 25 feet tall and up close, suckers pulsing and dripping sea water and you’ve got the kraken. Fortunately for the audience, sensorama was a 1950s fad and we aren’t subjected to the kraken’s breath, which is described as having the stench of 100 dead fish.
But Jack has a plan: find the key to Davy Jones’ locker and gain possession of his still-beating heart, the heart he locked away after losing his true love. To what end Jack wants possession of the heart we’re never told, but you can bet it’s convoluted and it’s not what it seems. Very little is what it seems in this film which is filled with myth and obliqueness, double crosses and lies.
Performances in this film are pretty much spot on, with Depp doing his “pirate as magpie” routine yet again. One major flaw in this film is that we don’t really get enough of Capt. Jack. The film lights up when he is on-screen but goes flat when we’re concentrating on Will (poor Orlando Bloom…his character grows not a whit in this installment), while Knightly’s Elizabeth seems to expand quite a bit, showing more of the guile that we saw in the first film and seeming to blossom and begin to become a woman with her own thoughts, and particularly her own desires.
While some of the bits and set pieces go on too long, particularly the excursion to the island ruled by cannibals, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is exactly what it sets out to be, the second act of a trilogy no one ever expected to make. Three popcorns out of 5.
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