Zalen

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is a fun movie about love interrupted, greed, and doing the right thing. Surprisingly, not the Disney version of "doing the right thing" but a version more closely in line with the real world. Dead Man's Chest is much darker but, unfortunately, weaker version of the original.

The Good: ILM is not always dead-on (The Mummy Returns, for instance), but except in very few cases here they've absolutely nailed the special effects. The story is good, but Jack Sparrow is much more of a bumbling buffoon than drunken master in deference to focus more upon the Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann characters - and a few other re-appearances. The story isn't much about Jack at all, but that's okay.

The Bad: The things that Disney shoves down your throat, which they don't do in the first movie because they didn't expect it to succeed this well. But now they have you, and they're going to do things to you that you don't necessarily want. The fortunate part is they don't do it much, which takes the pressure off. There are enough that different people will see different problems, and some that I didn't notice, just be warned that they're there.

The Ugly: I didn't like how in Matrix Revolutions the movie ended and they tacked on an extra five-minute teaser scene in attempt to tie it into the next movie. I don't like it here, either. It's not the cliffhanger it is in Matrix II but it can't help but smack of "oh no, what will happen next!"

In second place is that it is not always clear where people are.

Defining Moment: Will Turner, looking for Jack Sparrow, very quickly goes through the first half of the first movie in about thirty seconds. You might miss it. Dead Man's Chest has a lot of this; every so often there's something - from a nod to a scene that's uncomfortably out-of-place - that harkens back to the first movie, to the original Pirates ride, or both.

And, as in X3, stay to the end for fun, after-credits huzzah.