Dead Man’s Best
by James Roland
SPOILER ALERT
So, why is it that every Hollywood franchise (other than X-Men and Spiderman) decides to make sequels instead of movies?
The first frantic twenty minutes of Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest feels like a speed-date style family reunion. Characters move at a lightning pace, spilling exposition like ballast to keep a weighted script from sinking. Old characters greet a plethora of new characters by using their name over and over and over so that audience members will be able to keep track.
Unfortunately most of the new characters are designed to be forgettable. Gone is the mosaic background of colorful character actors; it has been replaced with standard ‘piratey’ faces and the evil Napolean-esque rep for the East Indian Trading Company that does everything but hide his hand in his coat and throw a temper tantrum.
With the exception of the insanely awesome Bill Nighy as Davey Jones and Naomie Harris (who made her first bow to America as Selena in 28 Days Later) as the disgustingly sexy Tia Dalma, there are no playful characters, no actors that relish their roles the way that Geoffrey Rush and Johnny Depp did in the first film.
Gone, as well, is the pithy dialogue and beautifully constructed story of the first film. Instead, Dead Man blathers pirate-type noises and annoying references to the first film (halfway into the film you’ll find yourself wondering just how many jokes one screenplay can make out of the word ‘rum’).
The real curse of the Black Pearl is that the audience is cheated. The audience is cheated from seeing James Norrington’s descent into piracy, the audience is cheated from seeing the disastrous wedding of Will and Elizabeth and every other exciting moment that would have happened to the characters between the first two films. But, worst of all, the audience is cheated out of the brilliant death scene of the Black Pearl’s Captain Barbossa when he makes his appearance in the last frame of the sequel, profanely munching an apple and asking himself silently, “how exactly did I survive a bullet to the heart?”
At the end of Dead Man, audiences should ask themselves the same question.
