Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest


by Jerry Roberts

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is a traffic jam at the plot factory, a movie so overwritten that even when it's over it's not over. Or let me put it this way, the plot is so complicated that it is going to take yet another movie to finish what this movie started. I learned almost too late that this movie is actually the center piece of a trilogy and I pity the writers of that film who have to untie the knots from this one.

Steamrolling along at a running time of nearly three hours here is a movie visually made for the big screen but on DVD will make you thank the heavens for a rewind button. There is a LOT of story here and I think I understood only about 40% of it. The plot threads that I could untangle were kind of intriguing. Captain Jack Sparrow, we learn, owes a blood debt to the legendary Davy Jones, the spectrely captain of The Flying Dutchman whose crew is made up of men who are doomed to serve him for a certain term until their time is up. Time is running out, we learn, and he has to find a way out of his debt or he will serve the fishy captain for all eternity.

We also learn that he is a wanted man in just about every port you can name. That screws up the wedding plans of his former matey Will Turner and blushing bride Elizabeth Swann when they are charged with death because of their association with him in their last adventure. Meanwhile Will learns that is father Bootstrap Bill is doing time on Jones' ship and sets out to rescue him. Meanwhile there's some business of a compass that will lead to a key that leads to a Dead Man's Chest that contains the still beating heart of Davy Jones. Meanwhile there's the evil Culter Beckett back in England who wants the key to find Jones' heart. These are the more coherent plot threads and there are a lot more but I honestly had to work to untangle them

The plot threads are set up, some pay off and some do not and some we care about and some we don't. But the movie overloads us with one development and backtwist after another until we settle into the realization that these plot elements are not advancing on a narrative but are stringing together one megazilla action sequence after another. By the end we're so worn down that the emotional investment that we're suppose to have is washed out.

Technically the movie is brilliant. Amid the mish mash of a plot I must observe the film's one astonishingly brilliant element and that would be Davy Jones. Jones is an astonishing technological marvel, a creature so unholy but so technically beautiful that the magicians who brought him to life should congratulate themselves. Here is a creature with a beared made of tentacles and the tentacles undulate this way and that all independently of one another, they all seem to have a life of their own. His scottish brouge is an original, he doesn't just hiss and squish but his voice has texture and you sense a personality there. When he smokes, his skins expands and retracts. There is a scene in which he sits in the bowels of his ship playing the organ with his tentacles in which I really grinned, the scene isn't necessary to the plot but I loved the generosity of the filmmakers to include it.

Jones' ship is a marvel as well, a scummy, drippy creation made of wood and bones this is part ship and part submarine. It is occupied by creatures who are half men half sea creatures including one who seems to have been cross-bred with a hammer-head shark and another creature that is melded with the hull of the ship. Alas, I was not as impressed with their chief weapon, a giant monsterous creature called The Kraken who is made of tentacles and teeth and capable of snapping a ship in half. There is a real threat when the creature attacks but there wasn't a wow factor to it, I kept thinking that when you've seen one tentacle you've seen them all and that Ray Harryhausen created a much more convincing Kraken for Clash of the Titans 25 years ago.

But technical achievements aside, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ultimately is just too much, too long, too overcomplicated and too meandering. I understand the necessity of trying to set up elements to be solved in POTC3 but I really would have preferred more coherance. The ending that is equal in cliffhanger status to The Empire Strikes Back but lack of narrative robs us of the emotional punch. Maybe after almost three hours I was so worn out and ready to go home that my investment had been dampened.