Savvy? Negative

The best thing that can be said, sadly, about Dead Man's Chest is that we're closer to the final piece of the trilogy. "Lacking" might be the appropriate word here, because if there was a story hidden inside Davey Jones' tentacled-face, it stayed in there, writhing, painfully trying to be free of the bloated, overdone, effects-heavy dark movie I endured this morning.

And we didn't only lack a story. We lacked nearly everything that made the first Pirates movie so ridiculously fun: Consistent swashbuckling, ship battles, birhgt settings, and a hippity-hop pace that kept you on the leappads just long enough that you didn't sink. Orlando Bloom was hilarious in that he was too serious. And of course, Johnny Depp was nothing but surprisingly brilliant in nearly every way...from his tics to his swordfighting to his cleverness that you never quite expected.

And that's the hardest part: Jack Sparrow was missing. He wasn't even in the movie; he was rowing away in a longboat, trying to leave a film that's now a piece of a franchise. There wasn't any of those Jack I'm-going-to-outsmart-you moments that pretty much made the first movie; indeed, he even said at one point that he didn't know what he was doing.

So in his place, we get a giant sea monster that Davey Jones can apparently conjure up by turning a wheel on his ship that, you would think, someone in power would have tried to destroy by now. I love the Kraken, especially from my Final Fantasy I days, but if I had wanted to see boats decimated, I could have played Battleship. So many things didn't make sense: An absurdly lame dice game, how the cannibals even got Will in that cage, why Jones sleeps (and what he even does), and the fact that nobody noticed the chest was a bit light. I'm just saying.

The whole movie felt very Empire Strikes Back: dark, brooding, and sandwiched. We had a visit to Yoda, a lot of dark sets, and no ending. We shall have to wait until 2007 for that, apparently.

(There was a Transformers trailer. But it, too, disappointed.)