Pirates of the Crapibbean

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For the record, I thought the first Pirates of the Caribbean was very over-rated. Sure, Johnny Depp’s camp, finger-wiggling performances was entertaining but the film itself was overlong and followed a very repetitive pattern of kidnap-follow-rescue- kidnap-follow-rescue.

I didn’t hold a grudge though and went into the cinema on Friday evening to watch the sequel, Dead Man’s Chest, with a completely neutral frame of mind. With the box office records this film is breaking, and the stories of assorted nuts out there going to watch it 3 times on weekend, I thought I’d give it a chance. There must be something in the sequel that improves on the original.

Well, I’m afraid that all the flaws of the original are magnified in the sequel. The film is overlong at 2 hours and 20 minutes – I started micro-sleeping during the final battle with the Kraken – and the film is riddled with more plot holes than a leaky pirate ship. Some sequences are ridiculous to completely nonsensical.

What charm there was in the first film is almost completely absent here. There’s a lot less humour and swinging-from-the-mast swashbuckling, and even Johnny Depp seems a bit muted in his performances this time around



The film’s only real positives are excellent special effects (Bill Nighy’s Davey Jones especially), some stunning set and costume design (the voodoo den, for example), and an entertaining set-piece action sequence involving cannibals, bone cages and Johnny Depp tied to a bamboo skewer.

But as far as contemporary cinema adventures goes, King Kong is the best recent entry in this genre. Utterly forgettable, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest scores between 5 and 6 out of 10, depending how generous I’m feeling.

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