There's a scene in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" when Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) gets smashingly drunk off a flagon of rum. That Depp's behavior during this scene is nearly indistinguishable from his character's more sober moments is not a flaw; it is the genius of his performance. Slurring his voice into a thick cockney mumble, his chiseled features buried beneath mounds of dreadlocks and eye-shadow, Depp swashes his buckle from one end of the screen to the other with the freewheeling abandon of a bohemian rock star gone mad. In an age when action heroes all seem to be carved from the same stoic marble, Depp's gleefully iconoclastic portrayal deserves to be remembered as one of the great comic concoctions of the past few years.
It's a pity, therefore, that the film itself can't even begin to keep up with the originality of its lead performance. Following in the footsteps of 2003's "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," the second installment of the "Pirates" franchise plays like a textbook example of everything that can go wrong when commercial success necessitates the release of a superfluous sequel. In an effort to bestow "Dead Man's Chest" with an even broader appeal than its predecessor, the filmmakers have sanded down the edge that made the first "Pirates" into such a pulpy delight. Gone are the pitch-black humor and eerie resonance of the original, replaced by a half-hearted attempt at camp that feels more at home in a Saturday morning cartoon than on the big screen.
"Dead Man's Chest" opens immediately where the last film left off, with Captain Jack adventuring on the high seas while his first mate Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) prepares to settle down with his fiance Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley). Alas, Elizabeth is arrested on the eve of their wedding day by the slithery Admiral Beckett (Tom Hollander), who charges her with aiding and abetting the pirate cause. Beckett informs Will that the only way to save his fiance's lovely neck from the noose is for him to hand over the erstwhile Jack to the custody of her majesty's navy. With little more than a second thought, Will bids a cheerful farewell to Elizabeth through the bars of her cell and hops aboard the nearest ship to seek out Captain Jack and bring him to justice.
As we quickly learn, however, Jack has far more to worry about than the ire of the British government. A barnacle-encrusted zombie materializes on Jack's ship and informs him that he owes a blood debt to the malevolent sea king Davy Jones. It is unclear what this debt entails or why Jack owes it, but regardless, to save his soul, Jack goes searching for a mysterious artifact known as the Dead Man's Chest, which holds the power to break Davy Jones' curse. Will agrees to help Jack in exchange for his assistance in freeing Elizabeth, and that's where the plot ends and the CGI explosions take over.
When we eventually meet Davy Jones he is a sight to behold; a hulking monster with a beard of tentacles and a crab claw for a hand, Jones thunders about barking orders in a thick Scottish brogue and hammering away at a phantasmal organ in his spare time. He commands a ship full of zombie pirates who have sold their souls to him in exchange for eternal life. Not a particularly wise trade, from the looks of it -- the zombies have the appearance of grotesque humanoid sea monsters covered in brine and barnacles. At one point Jack slices one of them open in a swordfight, and a stream of live fish pours out from its belly in place of the usual guts and blood.
Sea monsters notwithstanding, Jack and Will manage to momentarily evade Davy Jones, and find themselves instead on an island populated by a tribe of ravenous cannibals. The cannibals mistake Jack for their king but try to eat him anyway, leading to a daring escape that involves Jack sword-fighting on top of a 40-feet-tall waterwheel. Why do the cannibals, who appear to live in tiny mud huts, happen to have a 40-foot-tall waterwheel on hand? So that Jack can have a sword fight on top of it, evidently. Eventually Jack climbs down off the waterwheel and he and Will return to their quest for the chest. Clearly, the blood debt he's trying to avoid doesn't come with too strict a time frame.
As I examine the shambles of the movie's plot, questions abound. What do 45 minutes of cannibals have to do with anything? Why does the film feel the need to buffer its already long midsection with an irrelevant love triangle between Will, Jack and Elizabeth? Who is that scantily-clad sorceress that keeps popping up every few scenes to offer the heroes helpful epigrams like "There be an aura of destiny about you, child!"? Such quibbles may sound like nitpicking -- the movie is based on a theme park ride, after all -- but that's just the problem; the overstuffed narrative holds so little dramatic tension that there's nothing to distract us from picking apart inadequacy of the plot.
It didn't have to be this way. The original "Pirates" was no less ridiculous than the current incarnation, but it managed to remain consistently engaging thanks to a stronger sense of tone -- it had a sharp eye for the alluringly roguish nature of pirate mythology, and told its goofy story straight enough as to be downright spooky at points. This time around, someone seems to have made the regrettable decision to lighten things up in the interest of family-friendly marketability -- when we see pirates sail the seas and monsters rise from the deep, it makes us long for excitement and drama, not cheap sight gags and silly one-liners.
"Dead Man's Chest" drifts along harmlessly enough for the majority of its running time, but that's just it -- all it ever does is drift, with little more than a light breeze to fill its soggy sails. The film feels very much like an unnecessary yet lucrative midsection that bridges the gap between the originality of the first installment and dramatic climax of the third. Captain Jack may be one of the screen's great lovable rogues, but here he's trapped in a movie that doesn't come close to matching his swagger.
