Pirates of the Caribbean Two — Page 5

Originally posted by: Mike O
What plot? Pirates 2 had the same problem as The Mummy Returns. The first film in both franchises was far, far from great, but they had certain charms. Both sequels overload on the effects and action to the point where it becomes tiresome.

Originally posted by: Invader Jenny
But this movie? Bah. I found the plot to be a little hard to follow. So many things were going on at once that it just became white noise. Capt. Sparrow lost all of his charm and became more self centered. And I don't know where the infatuation with Swan came from. There really wasn't that much there in the first movie, so the second movie made me confused. Plus, I hate Swan now, the bitch. First she leaves her first fiance, and now apparently is drifting towards Jack and leaving Will behind... good lord. I really hated her walking out of the theater.

Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
What gets me is how eager everyone is to save Jack, especially Will. Will has the most reason to say, "Screw that idiot pirate!" I mean, Jack betrayed Will to Davy Jones. He got into a potentially deadly sword fight with him. And, as far as Will knows, Jack was having an affair with his fiancee. Yet he jumps up and says, "Yes! I'll put my life on the line to save him!" It was a cool cliffhanger ending, but it was just a bit hard for me to accept that Will would get over everything so easily.

Epics come about by necessity. The material demands it. A story is too big and too grand to contain within the usual boundaries, and so an epic is born. "The Lord of the Rings," for example, became an epic film trilogy because its story could only be told in that form. Epics don't come about through sheer willpower, by someone deciding to make an epic and then stuffing a weak story with a lot of junk. Do that and you don't get an epic, just cinematic water torture on the order of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest."
This second installment in the "Pirates" trilogy is more than the usual bad or even numbingly horrible movie. It's an amalgam of many of the modern cinema's worst tendencies and modern filmmaking's most unfortunate misconceptions. The film has an epic scale without an epic story, epic characters, epic ideas or epic emotions. The conversations are without wit and often without purpose. Much of the acting consists of mugging and empty gestures. Scenes are stretched out for no reason but to give the illusion of importance, so that the story is buried under rubble. Worst of all, director Gore Verbinski doesn't seem to understand the difference between motion and action.

It's an important difference. Motion is just violence and tumult happening onscreen. Action is violence and tumult that actively advances the story. Of recent movies, "Mission: Impossible III" has action scenes, while Peter Jackson's "King Kong" mostly consists of motion (at least in the Skull Island sequences). In "Pirates," whenever there's a battle, or a fight, or a chase scene, the story comes to a dead stop while the filmmakers devise clever, active ways for absolutely nothing to happen. The slightest incident is pumped up into a 10- or 15-minute segment. In one scene, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) has to escape from native islanders who want to use him in a ritual sacrifice. The movie has one inventive stunt (he's attached to a pole and finds himself stuck between two mountains), but by the time that stunt arrives, its moment has long past.

As Captain Jack the Pirate, Depp seems to have lost some of the Keith Richards swagger that he had in the first installment, but he's still game and willing to mug his way through the picture. That's fine. The problem is that he has nowhere to take the character -- it's a self-contained dead end -- while the filmmakers seem to have decided, this time out, to take Captain Jack seriously. It does Depp no justice to take the amusing caricature he's created and try to give it a complicated moral nature. Observe how uncomfortable, how torn in two directions Depp looks in his heart-to-heart conversations with Keira Knightley, as he tries to play a scene and remain Captain Jack at the same time.

Originally posted by: San Fransisco Chronicle

Epics come about by necessity. The material demands it. A story is too big and too grand to contain within the usual boundaries, and so an epic is born. "The Lord of the Rings," for example, became an epic film trilogy because its story could only be told in that form. Epics don't come about through sheer willpower, by someone deciding to make an epic and then stuffing a weak story with a lot of junk. Do that and you don't get an epic, just cinematic water torture on the order of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest."
This second installment in the "Pirates" trilogy is more than the usual bad or even numbingly horrible movie. It's an amalgam of many of the modern cinema's worst tendencies and modern filmmaking's most unfortunate misconceptions. The film has an epic scale without an epic story, epic characters, epic ideas or epic emotions. The conversations are without wit and often without purpose. Much of the acting consists of mugging and empty gestures. Scenes are stretched out for no reason but to give the illusion of importance, so that the story is buried under rubble. Worst of all, director Gore Verbinski doesn't seem to understand the difference between motion and action.

It's an important difference. Motion is just violence and tumult happening onscreen. Action is violence and tumult that actively advances the story. Of recent movies, "Mission: Impossible III" has action scenes, while Peter Jackson's "King Kong" mostly consists of motion (at least in the Skull Island sequences). In "Pirates," whenever there's a battle, or a fight, or a chase scene, the story comes to a dead stop while the filmmakers devise clever, active ways for absolutely nothing to happen. The slightest incident is pumped up into a 10- or 15-minute segment. In one scene, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) has to escape from native islanders who want to use him in a ritual sacrifice. The movie has one inventive stunt (he's attached to a pole and finds himself stuck between two mountains), but by the time that stunt arrives, its moment has long past.

As Captain Jack the Pirate, Depp seems to have lost some of the Keith Richards swagger that he had in the first installment, but he's still game and willing to mug his way through the picture. That's fine. The problem is that he has nowhere to take the character -- it's a self-contained dead end -- while the filmmakers seem to have decided, this time out, to take Captain Jack seriously. It does Depp no justice to take the amusing caricature he's created and try to give it a complicated moral nature. Observe how uncomfortable, how torn in two directions Depp looks in his heart-to-heart conversations with Keira Knightley, as he tries to play a scene and remain Captain Jack at the same time.

Originally posted by: Yoda Is Your Father
The 'point' should have been to make a good, entertaining movie, not a made-to-order epic 2 parter. If Pirates 3 is a fantastic conclusion and Pirates 2 turns out to be another ESB, I'll eat my words, but until then, I did not enjoy Pirates 2 and am very disapointed.