Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Year: 2006
Director: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Johnny Depp, Tom Hollander, Kiera Knightley & Bill Nighy
Runtime: 150 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 26/07/23
Director: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Johnny Depp, Tom Hollander, Kiera Knightley & Bill Nighy
Runtime: 150 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 26/07/23
The immense and unexpected success of The Curse of the Black Pearl prompted Disney to commission two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels that would start production almost immediately, with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and director Gore Verbinski set to return, and signing on the majority of the same cast. Disney had found success, and they wanted to double down on it hard and fast and were prepared to give Bruckheimer and Verbinski almost complete freedom and a near limitless budget. This could have been a recipe for disaster but once a lengthy and complex story had been drafted by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, Bruckheimer and Verbinsky optioned that rather than making two separate adventures, that the second and third Pirates film would be shot back-to-back, share a large budget, and would spread a single-story arc over two films (similar to the process used when creating the second and third Matrix films). Willing to do whatever it took to get more swashbuckling on the big screen as fast as possible, Disney agreed and so what became Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End still hold the record for the most expensive films ever made, sharing a budget of around $550 million. As we know now these sequels would go on to be some of the highest grossing films of all time, and for two years Pirates fever was well and truly felt the world over. But now that the rum is well and truly gone, why do these sequels not have the same long-lasting legacy that Black Pearl did? First up on the chopping block, Dead Man’s Chest.
Arrested and charged with treason on their wedding day, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Kiera Knightley) become at the mercy of Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) of the East India Trading Company. Beckett also has arrest warrants for the former Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport) and Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), neither of which have been seen in months. To earn back his and Elizabeth’s freedom, Will is tasked with tracking down Jack and procuring his broken compass for Beckett.
Meanwhile Jack is visited by ‘Bootstrap’ Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgard), Will’s father and a crew member of the Flying Dutchman who marks him with the black spot, informing him that Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) is coming for him and he must choose to either become a crew member of the Dutchman, or be taken by the Kraken and spend eternity in Davy Jones’ Locker.
When Will finds Jack, Jack informs Will of his father’s fate and promises Will that he can save his father’s life if he helps Jack find the Dead Man’s Chest, a box that contains the heart of Davy Jones. With this Jack will control the Kraken, and Will can save his father, but when the disgraced Norrington catches wind of the power the Dead Man’s Chest has, he figures he can have his glory as a Naval commander restored if he delivers the heart to Beckett.
Arrested and charged with treason on their wedding day, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Kiera Knightley) become at the mercy of Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) of the East India Trading Company. Beckett also has arrest warrants for the former Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport) and Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), neither of which have been seen in months. To earn back his and Elizabeth’s freedom, Will is tasked with tracking down Jack and procuring his broken compass for Beckett.
Meanwhile Jack is visited by ‘Bootstrap’ Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgard), Will’s father and a crew member of the Flying Dutchman who marks him with the black spot, informing him that Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) is coming for him and he must choose to either become a crew member of the Dutchman, or be taken by the Kraken and spend eternity in Davy Jones’ Locker.
When Will finds Jack, Jack informs Will of his father’s fate and promises Will that he can save his father’s life if he helps Jack find the Dead Man’s Chest, a box that contains the heart of Davy Jones. With this Jack will control the Kraken, and Will can save his father, but when the disgraced Norrington catches wind of the power the Dead Man’s Chest has, he figures he can have his glory as a Naval commander restored if he delivers the heart to Beckett.
There’s a number of problems with Dead man’s Chest, but here’s a quick run-down. The story is far too complicated, not an awful lot actually happens, and the film is horrendously long clocking in at two and a half hours. It’s weird to have a film where so much is going on but nothing really happens, and I think what would have worked out best is if the entirety of Dead Man’s Chest was compressed into thirty minutes to an hour and was the opening act to At World’s End. There’s so much stalling for time in this script, so much fluff that you need to endure to get to the few moments that are actually important. Then of course because this is just the first half of the story, so by the time the credits roll nothing has actually been achieved.
I know that I’m not the biggest fan of the story to Curse of the Black Pearl, but at least things happened in it. There was a definitive start, middle, and end, and each character had stakes. With Dead Man’s Chest that couldn’t be further from the truth. Whilst I like the opening scene of the sabotaged wedding day, the film doesn’t really have a purpose until Will and Jack reunite and that’s almost forty minutes in. It then resumed its aimlessness until the last half an hour or so once the Dead Man’s Chest is located and everyone’s actual motivations fall into place. Everything in the middle is just this kind of unwieldy, flabby mess of directionless tedium.
The Curse of the Black Pearl’s greatest strength was in its characters and the strong performances from the actors, and whilst the performances are once again top notch, even the characters feel paper thin this time around. Jack is promoted from bumbling comic relief to one of two main characters, a position he shares with Will. Jack is given so much screentime in Dead Man’s Chest, and it’s all so Depp can do the weird walks, the funny talks, and just generally exist as Jack Sparrow for our entertainment, and whilst I won’t deny he continues to deliver that iconic performance so well, Jack worked best in Black Pearl when he was just existing around everybody else, not when he took charge of a scene. In Dead Man’s Chest, he is arguably the film’s biggest driving force, he has perhaps the most agency of any of the characters, almost everything that transpires is a direct result of his actions and his motivations. Will meanwhile stops being this multi-layered hero and instead just becomes a man on a series of fetch quests, He’s pushed from pillar to post to just acquire seemingly random objects from people, all with the idea that he’s going to get Jack’s compass at the end of it all and free Elizabeth from imprisonment.
Elizabeth does get a decent amount of screentime too, but she’s not really given anything to actually do. She gets her own fetch quest from Beckett towards the back end of the film which is how Norrington gets brought back into the fold, but honestly you could probably cut out Elizabeth from this film entirely and apart from maybe one scene right at the end she wouldn’t have any impact on the plot whatsoever.
I know that I’m not the biggest fan of the story to Curse of the Black Pearl, but at least things happened in it. There was a definitive start, middle, and end, and each character had stakes. With Dead Man’s Chest that couldn’t be further from the truth. Whilst I like the opening scene of the sabotaged wedding day, the film doesn’t really have a purpose until Will and Jack reunite and that’s almost forty minutes in. It then resumed its aimlessness until the last half an hour or so once the Dead Man’s Chest is located and everyone’s actual motivations fall into place. Everything in the middle is just this kind of unwieldy, flabby mess of directionless tedium.
The Curse of the Black Pearl’s greatest strength was in its characters and the strong performances from the actors, and whilst the performances are once again top notch, even the characters feel paper thin this time around. Jack is promoted from bumbling comic relief to one of two main characters, a position he shares with Will. Jack is given so much screentime in Dead Man’s Chest, and it’s all so Depp can do the weird walks, the funny talks, and just generally exist as Jack Sparrow for our entertainment, and whilst I won’t deny he continues to deliver that iconic performance so well, Jack worked best in Black Pearl when he was just existing around everybody else, not when he took charge of a scene. In Dead Man’s Chest, he is arguably the film’s biggest driving force, he has perhaps the most agency of any of the characters, almost everything that transpires is a direct result of his actions and his motivations. Will meanwhile stops being this multi-layered hero and instead just becomes a man on a series of fetch quests, He’s pushed from pillar to post to just acquire seemingly random objects from people, all with the idea that he’s going to get Jack’s compass at the end of it all and free Elizabeth from imprisonment.
Elizabeth does get a decent amount of screentime too, but she’s not really given anything to actually do. She gets her own fetch quest from Beckett towards the back end of the film which is how Norrington gets brought back into the fold, but honestly you could probably cut out Elizabeth from this film entirely and apart from maybe one scene right at the end she wouldn’t have any impact on the plot whatsoever.
The two new characters that stand out the most are Beckett and Davey Jones. I love Tom Hollander and I think he’s a massively underrated actor. He plays villains so well because he’s such a slippery bastard. He makes Beckett such a nasty piece of work and I loved it when he was on screen, a human villain that carries the torch over very nicely from Barbossa in the first film. But Nighy’s performance as Davey Jones is almost good enough to rival Depp’s. He really lives in that character and brings him to life with such ferocious energy. The problem is he's not much more than a bit player in the story for Dead Man’s Chest. His involvement deepens much more in At World’s End, but for this film he’s on the periphery most of the time.
If there’s one thing, I can definitely praise though it’s the production values. The Curse of the Black Pearl looked amazing with its detailed sets, costumes, and exotic locales, and Dead Man’s Chest doubles down on all of that. It’s bigger in every sense of the word, and a lot of what you see was achieved using practical effects, so it’s really great to see such epic swashbuckling action being cared for right down to the tiniest details.
I have to say though, I’m surprised at how gruesome the film is. Black Pearl had its moments with the undead crew, but they all looked a bit cartoony. In Dead Man’s Chest, the crew of the Dutchman all look like they’ve been ripped out of a Cronenberg film. Plus, there was one moment that stuck in my mind near the start of the film that saw a man getting his eyeball pecked out by a crow, like how did Disney ever allow this to be put in a family film?
The film’s scale and grandeur owes a lot to Hans Zimmer’s amazing score that builds upon the foundations laid in Black Pearl’s score but goes to even greater heights.
Dead Man’s Chest is the epitome of stalling for time. It had about an act’s worth of story that it stretched out to cover a full film (and then some at that runtime), and the only reason that this is the case is so there only needed to be one script for two films. This is very much a first act; it ends just as the story begins to fall into place and because of how long it takes to get there you’ve either lost interest or fallen asleep. It’s convoluted for the sake of it, perhaps in an attempt to make it feel like more is happening than it is. This is such a disappointing decline in quality following on from Black Pearl, and unfortunately At World’s End wouldn’t fare much better.
If there’s one thing, I can definitely praise though it’s the production values. The Curse of the Black Pearl looked amazing with its detailed sets, costumes, and exotic locales, and Dead Man’s Chest doubles down on all of that. It’s bigger in every sense of the word, and a lot of what you see was achieved using practical effects, so it’s really great to see such epic swashbuckling action being cared for right down to the tiniest details.
I have to say though, I’m surprised at how gruesome the film is. Black Pearl had its moments with the undead crew, but they all looked a bit cartoony. In Dead Man’s Chest, the crew of the Dutchman all look like they’ve been ripped out of a Cronenberg film. Plus, there was one moment that stuck in my mind near the start of the film that saw a man getting his eyeball pecked out by a crow, like how did Disney ever allow this to be put in a family film?
The film’s scale and grandeur owes a lot to Hans Zimmer’s amazing score that builds upon the foundations laid in Black Pearl’s score but goes to even greater heights.
Dead Man’s Chest is the epitome of stalling for time. It had about an act’s worth of story that it stretched out to cover a full film (and then some at that runtime), and the only reason that this is the case is so there only needed to be one script for two films. This is very much a first act; it ends just as the story begins to fall into place and because of how long it takes to get there you’ve either lost interest or fallen asleep. It’s convoluted for the sake of it, perhaps in an attempt to make it feel like more is happening than it is. This is such a disappointing decline in quality following on from Black Pearl, and unfortunately At World’s End wouldn’t fare much better.