Aye ... so we braved the scorching heat today, first to go take The Girls up to the Nature Museum, and then off to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. We'd had some concerns (being a PG-13 film) that it would be a bit intense for them (at 6 and 10), as well as a bit long (at two and a half hours), but they did fine.I was confused about the PotC franchise ... somehow I had it in my head that there had already been a second movie, and that this was #3 ... and I'm not sure how that worked its way into my brain. I suppose that when the video of the first one showed up at home I was counting it as a new release ... I know I did a lot of "what if" scenarios anticipating the sequel of Curse of the Black Pearl, so may have muddled things that way as well.
Frankly, I didn't think Dead Man's Chest held together as well as Curse of the Black Pearl ... there was so much jumping about geographically and temporally (think of how long Jack and the Pearl crew had to have been with the cannibals for those cages to have been made by the body parts of other crew members ... yes, they have that montage of "pirate interviews" while Will is searching for him, but it still feels out of synch ... plus it seems like it takes no time at all to get from wherever back to Port Royal). It just seems like in the first one they went places, and in the second one the characters simply appeared places.
There were also bits that I thought were over-done, such as the fight on the water wheel ... sure, it's no doubt a technical marvel for the stunt team, but it went on forever, was telegraphed in advance (the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the wheel attached to the ruin was "I bet they're going to be on top of that any moment now"), and really didn't do anything for the story. That whole part of the movie played more like a Marx Brothers film (the whole who-had-the-key, who-has-the-chest, who-has-the-heart stuff). I'm also "over" having references to the ride (and other Disney stuff) in the film ... I think there were at least four in this one. My elder daughter even suggested that one way Jack survives his tete-a-tete with the Kraken is to "do a Geppetto", starting a fire in the monster's gut to have him coughed/belched out ... and after seeing this one, I wouldn't put it past them!
None of this is suggest that I didn't like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, it was quite a romp, and Davy Jones' fish-faced crew were certainly a fine bit of special effects work (but, gee, I sure liked his work in The Monkees better ... yuk, yuk, yuk). They certainly do have a lot of loose ends to tie up in the 3rd (and, I take it, final) movie ... however they did a good job of providing a nice logical story line for Bootstrap Bill (who had been "undead" but chained to a canon at the bottom of the ocean), so there's hope that all the hanging character stories (and WTF? moments) will be similarly resolved.