gore verbinski's PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST (2006) and AT WORLD'S END (2007)

the first Pirates Of The Caribbean film was, against all logic concerning how good an adaptation of a theme park ride ought to be, a hell of a good time at the movies. cautionary tales like Cutthroat Island aside, it's almost suspicious that it took until 2003 for Hollywood to trot out a big, dumb pirate movie revival, but they got it right, exploring and seemingly exhausting nearly every idea we could have wanted to see in a $140 million supernatural swashbuckler. the last ten months, though, suggest that screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio had enough material for three or four more films...and chose to cram them all into two.

neither of the sequels is bad, of course. both are just as entertaining as the first, and do their duty as sequels to up the ante with new characters and increasingly strange voyages. but the narrative thread Elliott and Rossio have split between the two films is so crushingly maximalist that it often verges on collapse, and occasionally pulls the films down with it. on one hand, they've built an impressive self-contained mythology, rewarding those viewers who pay closer attention to the films than may seem necessary; on the other, the films sometimes have trouble staying afloat carrying such convoluted cargo. no less mutinous is the six-act structure of the story, which in retrospect leaves far too much hanging in the balance between the two films for either to feel complete in and of itself -- the "see you and your money next summer for the rest of the movie" angle does more than anything else to insist on the films as simple commerce instead of carefree entertainment.

yet i can't help being impressed by Gore Verbinski, who has shown himself to be an extremely talented, loving shepherd for mainstream cinema, from his astouding translation of The Ring to Pirates' giddy spectacle. he doesn't quite have the storytelling chops to rival Peter Jackson's grab for Spielberg heirdom, but keeping everything so engaging amidst the narrative chaos (even during World's End's laborious, 45-minute long climax) is a feat no simple technician could have gotten away with. added to Rick Heinrichs' pitch-perfect production design, uniformly stunning effects work, Keira Knightley's insuppressible good looks, and the combined scenery-chewing of Bill Nighy, Geoffrey Rush and Johnny Depp, it would be somewhat of a feat to dislike the films outright; here it will have to be enough that the good far outweighs the bad.