Iona Firouzabadi
posted 2 August 2006

Captain Jack's back. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is the box office hit of the summer. But why? Reprising his 2003 Oscar-nominated role, Johnny Depp returns as Jack Sparrow, the pirate with more bizarre mannerisms than a Tourette's sufferer. But this time Depp's performance is all at sea, caught in a confused maelstrom of a plot and set adrift by a witless script.

Dead Man's Chest begins roughly where the last film ended - with the wedding of Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom). Only a few moments have passed in film-time since the ending of The Curse of the Black Pearl. In reality three years have gone by and you could be forgiven for having forgotten much of the original story. Unfortunately Pirates 2 is not so forgiving, and relies too heavily on its past details and recycled glory.

Before they can say 'I do' our wedding couple are put asunder by the first of a glut of villains, Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander). He threatens to clap the ever-pouting bride and her furrow-browed groom in irons. But Will is offered a dangerous means of escaping the gallows and freeing Elizabeth from her prison shackles - he must enter upon a quest to find the elusive Cap'n Jack and his magical compass (apparently you should remember said compass from the first film). It's a good enough start and Pirates 2 might have been rescued had it followed it through.

Unfortunately what ensues is a long, long sequence of disjointed scenes until the film ends without any conclusion. The problem is that the movie is constructed more as a multi-player computer game than as a coherent cinematic narrative. Plots are set up and knocked down all over the place in favour of keeping all players in the game and on eternal, multiple quests. It's not enough to be searching the seven seas just for a compass, so other game-tokens get introduced - a drawing of a key, the key itself, a chest, a heart and, inexplicably, a jar of dirt. Elizabeth is no sooner shackled than she escapes, sacrificing suspense and making Will's quest irrelevant. She then turns up onboard a random ship disguised as a boy and we're given no hint as to how she got there. By the time Will finally washes up on the same tropical beach as her, anyone would think he'd just come back from a pedalo trip, so palpable is the lack of excitement from both Bloom and Knightley.

The villains with the longest screen time are Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and his crew of assorted crustaceans, aboard the Flying Dutchman. While the CGI work is detailed and imaginative, something that's half man, half mollusc just isn't that scary. Neither is the concept of being slowly turned into a piece of coral - the fate worse than death that threatens Jack. The Kraken is a much scarier beastie, but it has too many encores and there's a real temptation to shout out 'it's behind you!'.

By the end of the film (a very, very long voyage from the beginning) you just don't care anymore - about anything or anyone. All of the characters have gone a bit nasty and the sparkle has gone from what promised to be a treasure of a film franchise. For Dead Man's Chest, dead is the operative word.