It Was Rated ARRRRRRRRR

And now, from the director of the Budweiser frogs commercials: Pirates of the Caribbean, Again. That’s right. Director Gore Verbinski got his start making high profile, instantly memorable, gimmicky advertising. Despite his switch to the feature film format, the only real difference between his older and newer work is length, for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest plays like nothing if not a high-concept, gimmick-riddled two and a half hour commercial for itself.

Bigger, broader, more expensive, and more determined to please at any cost—even a few hundred million—this is a movie that, more than anything, wants only to bulldoze brain cells and swing viewers into a drooling, tingly, summer-movie stupor—a braindead buzz that seeks only to further itself. Intermittently, it succeeds, but on the whole it is too concerned with trying to impress rather than actually being impressive. The setpieces and comic digressions don’t provoke laughs and thrills so much as wave their arms and make arguments about how exciting and funny they are.

I don’t have much to add to the general consensus on Pirates. It’s too long by far; calling it poorly structured is almost a compliment, in that it implies it has a real structure. There are too many subplots that end up marking time. Orlando Bloom is a bit better than he’s been before, but the overall effect is somewhat like watching a promising high schooler take an AP math exam: He’s pretty cute, and he seems to be working very hard, but it’s deadly dull for the rest of us. Knightley’s got a nice combination of raw sex appeal and flustered pluck, but she isn’t given enough to do. Depp is sometimes fun, but just as often, as one of the rowdy lads at Chud says, he looks like “Depp playing Depp playing Jack Sparrow.”

The effects are excellent, of course, at least in terms of invention and integration. But the construction of the action sequences themselves is only slightly better than average. Sure, the action is big, bigger, biggest, and there are enough explosions and giant sucker-laden tentacles for a lifetime’s worth of medieval Japanese theme dinners. But Verbinski doesn’t have any sense of pace or build up, and the shots he chooses are more functional than breathtaking.

As our boy Tony Scott says, it is “a movie with no particular interest in coherence, economy or feeling.” What concerns me most, though, is that this is the fourth major movie this summer that I’ve found somewhat entertaining, but which was robbed of very real potential for summer greatness by an underdeveloped script. Mission: Impossible 3, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Superman Returns and now Pirates have all been technically adroit films with solid premises and decent performances. They all had the raw materials, but none was able to really deliver. M:I3 and X-Men fell to rushed, underpowered stories, while Superman and Pirates both floated aimlessly on scripts marked by bloat and confusion. Sure, every one of them bore sequences of pure dazzle, but they displayed, at best, fleeting inspiration. They were of the moment, but nothing more. Perhaps this is the true result of film’s increasingly painterly nature—grandiose, often elegant imagery that demands your instantaneous awe, but cares little for your lasting thought.