by Todd Pheifer

Created on: April 11, 2008

Let's start with the logistics of this blockbuster sequel. You're going to want to budget some time to watch this film. The movie is 168 minutes, which for you non-math people is almost 3 hours. Thankfully, the movie moves along at a fast enough pace that 3 hours is not torturous. As for the film itself, I'm going to say that it is good, but not great. It is difficult to maintain the momentum with these types of films because at some point, you actually need to develop a (gasp) innovative plot.

The story throughout the trilogy has not been bad, but it hasn't been exactly Tolkienesque. If anything, the movie tries too hard to develop a complex plot, but the result is a certain level of confusion, as the audience has trouble deciphering who is loyal to who and what each character is actually trying to accomplish. This also leads to another recommendation, which is to avoid the jumbo soda before the movie because if you take any bathroom breaks, you may miss some subtle plot twists.

As expected, the movie is visually stunning which makes it worth seeing in the theater. The landscape and conceptual sets are beautiful and are used well by the film-makers in tandem with the ongoing action sequences. As with the prior films, the writers have sprinkled humor throughout the movie, though they borrow liberally from running jokes, and the dialogue is not quite as snappy as prior films.

The characters are mostly the same, though the primary villain Lord Cutler Beckett is a bit too diminutive to properly portray a striking antagonist. The film also has some interesting philosophical constructs revolving around the purgatory-like Locker of Davy Jones and the various motivations of main characters, but this is a bit too much of a high-entertainment summer blockbuster for these concepts to be properly developed.

Overall, this film is worth seeing in the theater and though you may hear that it is a cliff-hanger, I'm going suggest that it really isn't. In other words, if you don't wait through the credits it won't change the overall plot. However, it does give the viewer some interesting thing to think about, and it adds another piece to the possibility of a future sequel.

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