Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (Movie)

Even Captain Jack and his rotten grin can't keep 'Pirates' sequel from sinking

This second film is pretty much all thrills, special effects and nonstop action -- but with virtually no cohesive or compelling story line. 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.

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.

It is a major disappointment, a bloated, flabby, overwritten noisemaker that takes all the goodwill generated by the jaunty, inventive first installment and squanders it by throwing swash and buckle to the wind and cranking the volume up.