Viewed as the tricky second part of a trilogy, I guess this isn’t too bad. All the right pieces seem to be in the right places – even down to a great Jack Sparrow entrance, shooting a crow off the top of a coffin from the inside and then rowing it to safety with the skeletal arm of its intended inhabitant in his first scene. I really didn’t think they could match his entrance in the first movie, but this scene really perked my hopes up for the sequel living up to The Curse of the Black Pearl.

However, in addition to being about an hour too long, there is simply something massive missing here that I can’t put my finger on. Maybe it’s that the right pieces are so in the right places that it simply lacks the “out of the blue” feeling the first movie had. I expected the overlengthiness, had read about it, but I at least expected that the excess would be forgivable for being sheer fun or spectacle. But I only expected about 30 minutes of this max, not double that; and I really can think of almost a full 60 minutes here where I detached completely from the proceedings and which didn’t feel necessary to the movie on any grounds, even sheer fun and spectacle. Before and after that dragging hole, the movie’s great … but quelle dragging hole.

The visual effects are pretty amazing, though, and there are a handful of good laughs, though not as many as there should be over 150 minutes. I’ve recently been slightly baffled by BBC radio reviewer Mark Kermode’s apparent hatred of this series (never actually heard or read his reviews of the movie, but they’re always mentioning it in the podcast like some kind of torture for him), seeing as I loved the first one and couldn’t see how the sequels could be that bad even if they merely went through the motions with great care and expense, so long as they kept the cast, crew, etc intact, as the case is here and will be in part 3 … it’s certainly not a disaster, that’s for sure. But I think after another 3 hours of part 3 next year (and this movie basically exists just to force you to see that one – don’t expect a wrapped up ending), I fear I might just begin to understand his pain. My hope is that the filmmakers learn to spend more time on the story and cut and save the babies for an extended DVD cut – you’ll fit more screenings in per day, guys, more money, better movie, win, win!!!! But we know it’s too late for that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 5:26 pm in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.