For those of you who don't want to go back to page 1 and hit the link, here's some of the review that I particularly agree with:
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.
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.