Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Lively is an odd word for something called Dead Man's Chest, but lively it is. You won't find hotter action, wilder thrills or loopier laughs this summer.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

It's too long, unnecessarily complicated and often silly, but Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is still the purest popcorn entertainment of the summer.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The slow, uneven beginning is more than compensated for by the rousing climax.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Two of the big action set-pieces easily outdo anything from the previous edition.

USA Today Claudia Puig

It does deliver a combustible combination of ingredients for a summer blockbuster: a cornucopia of action and dazzling effects, some raucous humor and a large dose of Depp's winning charm.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Sufficiently resembles the first film that the heartiest fans should be content.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Depp is the comic gel that holds the whole enterprise together. The performance is a total delight that somehow combines Bugs Bunny, Peter Pan and Charlie Chaplin.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

A collection of swashbuckling set pieces with the hustle of a vaudeville show.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

It's all a bit much, yes, a bit exhausting, that's true, but then why on earth would anyone expect otherwise?

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Verbinski, Depp and company just want to make it the best ride you've had all summer. If that's all you demand of a frothy summer blockbuster, then this delivers the goods.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The movie's gross-out effects are impressive but wearying. How apt that the director's name is Gore.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The summer's most anticipated film, and it gives fans what they want - then more of what they want, and more, and more, until gluttony becomes force-feeding.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Again, as with "Star Wars," the interest lies at least as much in the set design and costumes as the narrative.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

You can't beat on Dead Man's on value-for-money terms, but it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet -- everything's tasty, the surfeit is sickening.

New York Post Kyle Smith

This chest is overfilled with exposition and physical comedy, without a doubloon's worth of the scary suspense that made the laughs in the first one such brilliant comic relief.

Empire Dan Jolin

Too long, and too wrapped up in its various plot contrivances to notice it’s veering off course. But Jack just about pulls the wheel back, aided by Verbinski’s flair for cartoonish comedy action.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Even more of a party-hearty-Marty potlatch of silliness than its predecessor. The franchise having been established, Verbinski, Bruckheimer, and Co. have been liberated to indulge in absurdities, pile on the so-old-they're-new-again clichés, and make jokes at their own expense.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The cast is entertaining, though with an asterisk, and the special effects are often spectacular, though sometimes not.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Far too long, but thanks to Depp--and to Bill Nighy, properly mean beneath his suckers and blubber--it swerves away from the errors committed by the other big movies this summer.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley manage to sparkle, but this overstuffed sequel is no treasure.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

The first of two sequels shot in immediate succession, Dead Man's Chest bears the unenviable burden of racking the pins for both movies, which leaves it with precious few opportunities to have a little fun of its own.

Premiere Ethan Alter

Dead Man's Chest is best summed up by the scene where Sparrow and Will battle each other atop a runaway water wheel. Like the characters, this movie is just running in circles.

Variety Todd McCarthy

There is a sense of bloat and where-do-we-go-from here aimlessness to this unconscionably protracted undertaking.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

Intermittently fun and high-spirited, Dead Man's Chest sags under the weight of its own running time.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Exactly the kind of thing most of us have in mind when we think "popcorn movie." It's largely brainless, pretty to look at, and produced solely as a lead-in to another moneymaking sequel for Disney.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

I was worn down by the excess: Depp's fruity impersonation of Keith Richards (or William F. Buckley) as pirate Jack Sparrow; too many bottomless chasms on an island with too many jungle savages (after the fashion of Peter Jackson's King Kong); Bill Nighy playing too squishy a villain with a beard of too many crawling octopus tentacles; too much violence, pop nihilism, and sick humor.

Slate Dana Stevens

The effects are breathtaking, and much of the action is choreographed with energy and wit. (A chase sequence on a cliff uses visual gags that defy the laws of physics, Wile E. Coyote-style.) But all of these moments bob on the film's slick surface like so much flotsam. Without a beating heart at its center, this Chest feels empty indeed.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

What do we want in a sequel? Just a little taste of the original or a triple serving piled high? Dead Man's Chest opts for the latter. This Disney movie isn't a follow-up to the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" so much as its empty-calorie clone.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

It batters you with novelty and works so hard to top itself that exhaustion sets in long before the second hour is over.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

The worst kind of sequel -- the kind that exists only to give you more-more-more of what you liked the first time around, without ever justifying its own existence. This lavish, superbly designed film goes on for an exhausting 2½ hours.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A long, tedious and convoluted follow-up to 2003's rollicking high-seas hit, The Curse of the Black Pearl, this second installment in the promised trilogy lacks the swash and buckle of the original. And then some.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

Whatever goodwill one harbored toward the first Pirates film is quickly dashed by its sneering successor, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which is less a film than a two-and-a-half-hour trailer for the final installment in this accidental trilogy.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

Infernally boring for much of its running time, and then, just as the pulse starts to quicken: To be continued.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

A noisy and lazy stopgap movie that goes absolutely nowhere and takes 2 1/2 hours to get there.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The second movie, Dead Man's Chest, is everything you feared the first would be: a theme-park spectacle lasting 2 1/2 hours.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Yes indeed, Pirates 2.0 is a theme ride, if by ride you mean a hellish contraption into which a ticket holder is strapped, overstimulated but unsatisfied, and unable to disengage until the operator releases the restraining harness.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

More than the usual bad or even numbingly horrible movie. It's an amalgam of many of the modern cinema's worst tendencies and modern filmmaking's most unfortunate misconceptions.