How do you replicate a fluke? That was the challenge posed by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, being the continuing adventures of that rascally Captain Jack Sparrow and his, um, well, there were some other folks, weren't there? Didn't he have a whole crew or something? And an adversary of some kind, surely, and I could swear I dimly recall a couple of moony young kids whose bland protestations of undying love would be periodically interrupted by some slurry, androgynous bit of Johnny Depp tomfoolery. The original PotC, unleashed upon an unsuspecting populace three summers ago, was a remarkable phenomenon: Never before had a formulaic, machine-cut Hollywood event film—inspired by a Disneyland ride, no less—been hijacked and utterly transformed by a single anarchic performance. So the first order of business for a sequel was to get Depp back in his bandanna and eyeliner, and the second order of business, I'm guessing, was to panic, because nothing else about the movie demands any further attention. All they could do, really, was create another generic story and pray for Depp-derived inspiration.
Having no character relationships worth giving a damn about, plus a star attraction whose appeal transcends any scripted lines or actions, writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have opted to make their plot as dense and labyrinthine as possible, even though nobody remembers or cares now what the first movie was "about." Dead Man's Chest takes its subtitle from Treasure Island, but its narrative throughline conflates two classic bits of nautical folklore. Captain Jack Sparrow, it seems, owes a debt of some sort to Davy Jones, of locker fame, and will be forced to spend eternity as a deckhand on the Flying Dutchman unless he can make good. Or unless he can somehow steal the titular chest, which contains Davy Jones' still-beating heart, removed from his own chest and placed there for safekeeping for reasons I no longer recall despite their having been laboriously explained. Meanwhile, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), having been arrested for aiding Sparrow in the previous film, can only escape execution by getting hold of Jack's magical compass, which points to whatever the bearer's heart most desires. And, of course, Keira Knightley is on hand to reprise her role as ... some hot chick.
Fact is, nobody wants to see this flick to find out what happens next. We want comic adventure and Deppian eccentricity, and wind up with regrettably little of either. Depp has a handful of choice moments here, including a priceless long-distance shot of Sparrow running at top speed from a horde of cannibals, hands flailing at his shoulders, looking exactly like a '50s scream queen pursued by a giant stop-motion insect. In general, though, Depp seems constrained by our expectations of him, which was perhaps itself to be expected. His performance in the first film was a devious act of subversion, unlicensed and unappreciated; studio execs were reportedly aghast, fearful that his shenanigans were destroying their valuable property. Scaring the suits was part of the fun, no doubt; placed front and center and expressly asked for more of the same, how could he not wind up on hambone autopilot? Where is the danger, the tightrope-walk excitement, if people are clamoring for his antics in advance? And so we get a rather dutiful reprise of Keith-Richards-as-Blackbeard, with the necessary glint missing from Depp's eye.
Fortunately for our fraying attention span, a handful of other fine character actors pick up the slack. As Davy Jones, depicted here as a barnacle-encrusted octopus-man sporting a thick beard of grasping tentacles, Bill Nighy (Love Actually) does such a marvelously unctuous job that I was startled to discover that the character's head is entirely computer-generated—Nighy's distinctive expressions and inflections are perfectly re-created. Naomie Harris (28 Days Later) lends an avid eerieness to her portrayal of a Jamaican voodoo priestess who bestows upon Sparrow an invaluable (or so she claims) jar of dirt. And Stellan Skarsgård, apparently unaware that he's trapped in a weightless trifle, heroically succeeds in eking a little gravitas from the forlorn figure of Will's father, "Bootstrap" Bill Turner. All three will appear in the next film, already shooting and due next summer, and it's the promise of their company, much more than Dead Man's Chest's cliffhanger ending, that has me hoping that the Pirates trilogy will turn out like a mattress that sags in the middle.