Movie Title: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.
Starring: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Jonathon Price, Stellan Skarsgard, Naomi Harris.
Date/Time Attended: The 2:20pm showing on Wednesday, July 19th. Wednesday showings at AMC include a FREE small popcorn (if you're a Moviewatcher member)...hooray!
Movie Synopsis in One Sentence: Encountering the familiar cast of friends and foes, Captain Jack Sparrow embarks on yet another adventure, this time involving a debt owed to the infamous Davy Jones.
The Good: Johnny Depp gives a pretty good performance, once again, as the uniquely quirky Jack Sparrow. The visual effects are absolutely stunning; Davy Jones's face, which is 100% visual effects, is so realistic looking that you would swear there's a human face under what would have been a latex mask in the pre-visual effects era. And, the last 60 seconds of the movie provides a very exciting revelation, which the concluding movie will ultimately explore.
The Bad: The movie is a tad on the slow side and suffers, as so many recent movies have, from being about 20 to 30 minutes too long. Also, the movie feels less like one solid story and more like a bunch of parallel stories, with various groups of characters colliding over and over again (this may just be an editing problem). Most disappointingly, the comedy and dialogue just doesn't come off as natural as it did in the first movie. Instead of being pleasantly over-the-top, it's down right Three Stooges-esque (and I love the comedy of The Three Stooges...just not when it's in my summer blockbuster movies); all that was missing was Johnny Depp smacking someone in the face with a frying pan!
Trilogy Syndrome: Much like the middle child of a family, the second movie of a trilogy seems to have the greatest chance of being considered the least impressive of the three. In The Matrix Trilogy, the second movie was a horrendously wordy mess of nothingness, especially when compared to the groundbreaking style of the original movie. In the newest Star Wars Trilogy, the second movie was a mushy love story with very little substance (then again, aside from a nimble Yoda, Darth Maul, and a pleasantly dark-natured 3rd movie, there wasn't much greatness to be found in this trilogy). Even in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, where all three of the movies are cinematic masterpieces, the second movie is clearly "the weakest" of the three simply because of it being the middle portion of a very long story. And, alas, we find our explanation...the second movie is in the middle, inherently lacking the excitement of the original movie and the grandeur of the concluding third movie. Of course, there are always exceptions and they seem to be common in the comic book movie trilogy, including Spider-Man 2 and X-Men 2 which I believe are both as good as, if not better than, their original counterparts. And that's all I have to say about that.
The Verdict: While failing to live up to it's spirited predecessor, this movie may or may not provide enough pirate-related fun to last you until the potentially exciting final installment.
If You Liked______, You May Like These: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, The Count of Monte Cristo, Sleepy Hollow.
FINAL GRADE: C+
No comments:
Post a Comment