Arrrr, avast behind!

[angelophile]

So, I went and saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest last night. What did I think? Well....

Pros:
When the action gets going it's as rollicking good fun as the first movie.
The leads are all as good as ever.
There's a load of in-jokes that are genuinely amusing.
It looks gorgeous.
Voodoo! Zombies! Cannibals! Sea monsters! Sword fights! Love triangles! Pirates! Undead monkey! Scheming villains! Ghosts! Ninjas!
The humour's as wry as ever.
Lee Arenberg and Mackenzie Crook steal all the scenes they're in, as with the first movie.
Jack Sparrow runs. A lot. And that's always funny.
It's mostly thoroughly entertaining.

Cons:
It's just too long.
There's a great long middle section that's completely devoid of any laughs.
There's just way too many deaths - unlike the first movie where very few people actually died, this is a bloodfest.
It's unnecessarily gory and scary for the family audience.
Davy Jones just isn't a very compelling villain, despite Bill Nighy's best efforts.
Too much CGI squeezes the human element out.
None of the characters come out of it being as likeable as the first movie.
They completely slaughter Norrington's character.
There are a lot of reasons, like those above, to consider this the "Back to the Future II" of the Pirates franchise.

Simply put, there's a fantastic movie in here struggling to get out and it's nearly there. When it cooks it really cooks, bubbling along with as much fizz and sparkle as the original movie. But an unecessarily convoluted plot where the main characters spend most of their time separated and a darkness throughout threatens to overpower the goodnature. There's simply so many ideas here, all of them developed, that the end result is a plot that's bloated rather than streamlined.

Apparently there's a post-credits gag but I missed it.