Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the sequel to the 2003 blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, is an entertaining way to spend a rainy Friday night (or any night, really), but it’s as shallow as the waters Jack Sparrow–Captain Jack Sparrow–tries to stick to for most of the film.
Johnny Depp returns as the swaggering, swashbuckling pirate Jack Sparrow, though this time there’s more swaggering and less buckling of swashes than in Curse. Following Curse’s events, Sparrow is back at the helm of the Black Pearl. He gets contacted by an undead “Bootstrap” Bill Turner (sort-of bad guy father of William Turner, who saved Sparrow’s ass last time) about it being time to repay an old debt to all-out bad guy Davy Jones. Apparently, Jones considers himself the king of the oceans and he holds some grudge against Sparrow. It never became quite clear to me why, which might be because it’s been a while since I saw Curse, or maybe Chest simply never explains it.
Meanwhile, an evil English lord gatecrashes the wedding of William Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) with an arrest warrant for both. Their role in Sparrow’s escape in Curse didn’t go over well with this lord, so he wants them hanged. He also wants to succeed Jones as king of the oceans, and probably he’d also be happy to become ruler of the rest of the world, if the opportunity presented itself. He’d make a fine James Bond villain, except that most of Bond’s enemies are not British, and they certainly do not come from the 19th century.
There are more unintentional Bond references. When Sparrow’s crew is attacked by spear-throwing, stone-slinging natives, none of the natives can hit any of the crewmen, just like Bond’s enemies are never able to hit Bond. Later, Sparrow falls down a chasm and lands hard on his back, which he really shouldn’t survive, but which he does nonetheless. That reminded me of GoldenEye, where bad guy Alec Trevelyan survived an equally deadly fall in the Arecibo Observatory telescope dish.
Anyway, back to Pirates. I suppose it’s a good thing the lord type cancelled the wedding, because I don’t think it would have lasted. Back in Curse, Ms Swann was going to marry some Commodore guy, but she dumped him in favour of Turner. This time, she develops feelings for Sparrow, despite her initial quest to rescue Turner from Jones. Pick one, I’d say, and stay with him. Now she has the rest of the Black Pearl crew thinking she might turn on them in the next movie.
Ah, yes. The next movie.
After two hours of Chest’s two-and-a-half hour run, I was wondering if they were ever going to finish the story. They weren’t. Chest ends like a cliff hanger. That’s okay. It just would have been more fun if it had ended with someone (or a lot of someones) actually hanging down a cliff, which would have been entirely possible given the setting of the movie.
With Sparrow on a quest for/against Jones, Ms Swann captured by the English lord, and Turner captured by Jones, the film sets out to find the titular dead man’s chest. The chest contains Jones’s still-beating heart, and that holds a certain appeal to many people. That’s kind of odd, I think, as I’d personally find a beating heart very creepy if it’s not surrounded by a body, but it seems to be quite normal for people in the Caribbean. Sounds like one place I’ll not put on my holiday list.
Turner wants to stab the heart to kill Jones once and for all (after all, Jones has been quite nasty to him) and to set his father free from Jones’s spell. Former Commodore Norrington (the guy Ms Swann was going to marry) wants to give it to the English lord to get his career back on track and to help the lord gain control over the oceans. Or perhaps he really wants to reign the oceans himself. I guess we’ll see in the next part. Sparrow wants to use the heart to exact some personal revenge on Jones, or something like that. I already forgot, if I even figured it out during the film.
Fortunately, that’s not important either. Actually, very little of the story is. The plot mainly serves as a way to get all the characters together in different groupings, in different locations, doing different things. The common thread in all of that, is that it should be as ridiculous as possible, because I suspect the writers and director thought that would be the most fun. Oh, how wrong they were.
Let’s revisit the original Pirates movie. Curse was great fun. It sparkled with energy and wonderfully captured the spirit from the theme park ride it was based on. It also had a story that made more or less sense. Most importantly, it was smart and witty.
Chest, unfortunately, kind of lacks those qualities. It’s still entertaining, but not nearly as much as its predecessor. It tries too hard to create funny scenes, while such scenes made themselves in Curse.
One problem, I guess, is that most pirate clichés were already used up by Curse, leaving only generic comedy routines for Chest. And where Curse took those pirate clichés and used them in that smart ‘n witty way, many of the jokes in Chest fell completely flat for me.
Example: at some point, two of Sparrow’s crew have the chest and try to escape Jones’s undead army. They run through a forest and a tree comes up right in the middle of their path. In an overly predictable way, they pass it on either side and the chest, carried between them, hits the tree. The only reason I had to laugh was because it was not at all funny, though the film definitely wanted it to be.
Another example: Sparrow is tied to a long pole by the previously mentioned natives. While most of them go off chasing Sparrow’s crewmen, Sparrow tries to escape. The pole is still strapped to his back when he comes across two female natives, who start throwing melons and coconuts at him. In defiance of all laws of physics (we’re talking a fist-thick pole here), they are skewered onto the pole on either side of Sparrow, as if it were a giant shish kebab. It looks totally stupid and it was totally unfunny. And yes, I have a much bigger problem with nonsense like this than with nonsense like undead people and submerging wooden ships. The latter are possible in Pirates world; the former is impossible in any world.
On the other hand, some jokes did work. While Sparrow is building a shish kebab, his crew is trapped in a cage and trying to escape the angry natives. They put their legs through holes in the bottom of the cage, lift it up, and run away as if they were in a Flintstones car. That one was hilarious in a good way.
The final showdown between Turner, Sparrow and Norrington, each pointing a sword at another, is a nice change of pace from the usual one-on-one hold-each-other-at-gunpoint scene. The ensuing sword fight is well choreographed and fun to watch, except for some very weird shots when they are rolling down a forest on a huge watermill wheel. And, I have to say, except for Ms Swan’s actions during the first part of the fight. She starts by calling for the men to grow up and stop fighting. When they don’t, she pretends to faint from the heat, but no one even looks her way. She then resorts to sitting and pouting, which also has no effect but to make her look stupid. What were the writers thinking there? It was totally out of character and apparently only served the purpose of letting the chest unguarded so it could be taken by someone else. That’s using out-of-character behaviour to advance the plot, and that’s never a good thing.
All in all, Chest falls prey to the problems almost all sequels face. It’s as if they took the leftover ideas from the original film, wrapped them in something that has to pass as a story, and added some weird stuff to fill the gaps. That’s not a movie, that’s a collection of good and bad scenes. And guess what? That’s exactly what Chest is.
In closing, I should point out one major highlight: the music. Composer Hans Zimmer did an excellent job expanding on Klaus Badelt’s score for Curse, which in turn drew heavily on Zimmer’s own work for Gladiator. Jack Sparrow’s theme is one of the best musical pieces I’ve ever heard, either inside or outside a cinema. Chest’s soundtrack actually brings some much-needed energy to many scenes, where the actors or the director couldn’t muster it on their own, and that did a lot for me to at least make it an entertaining two-and-a-half hours.
After all of that, one question remains: why was the film called Dead Man’s Chest? The chest was there, and Davy Jones had some semblance to a man, but he was far from dead. I suppose it sounds better than Living Man’s Chest or Undead Man’s Chest, but it really makes no sense. Perhaps it’s not so unfitting after all.
