Pirates 2 Worse Than Walking the Plank

For some reason, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest broke a 3-day earning record. According to this WashingtonPost.com article and video clip, this sequel earned $55 million on Friday and $132 million over the Friday-Sunday opening weekend. Regrettably, I was roped into being one of the people who shelled out $10 and two hours of my life to see this film and contribute to its undeserved financial success.

This sequel lacks most of the light-hearted and humorous banter that made the first movie passably fun. The production team made the mistake of taking this film somewhat seriously and trying to subject us to a boring drawn-out story line that is more about setting up for a third money making movie than actually showing the audience a good time. The only positive in this experience for me was that I was able to watch it at a place that offered true digital projection, which made for crisp visual effects, especially during the opening stormy ocean scenes.

The novelty of the digital screening quickly wore off as the movie’s unrelenting stream of CGI effects did nothing to compensate for the poor writing and utter lack of character development. As a viewer, I found myself wishing both heroes and villains alike would die in the hopes of ending the franchise. None of the characters inspired any emotional response; the villains weren't fun to hate and the heroes weren't worth rooting for. The movie would have been better if a tsunami came right after the opening credits and wiped out everyone before the plot could get started.

How can a bunch of people continuously fighting with swords never manage to cut anybody who wasn't made from CGI?!?! This movie’s continuous action scenes did to swords what the A-Team did to automatic rifles: it made them boring, commonplace, and pointless.

Overall the film serves as an example of why I try to avoid modern era Disney movies. It fits the typical Disney model of using excessive marketing, pointless action and self-gratifying special effects to sell a film devoid of believable characters, realism and creativity. Dead Man’s Chest actually has a lot of qualitative similarities to the recent Star Wars movies, so if you are still wincing at Vader’s final “Noooooo!” in Revenge of the Sith then you probably should avoid this over hyped sequel.