Capsule Reviews: Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, Skyfall, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, 2012)

Anticipating the ire of their many detractors, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim build their feature-length Billion Dollar Movie on a joke that plays on them inexplicably receiving money from major corporate interests to do their thing in the mainstream. The creative duo's audacity has often eclipsed the actual content of their 11-minute episodes on Adult Swim, making the prospect of a 95-minute feature daunting. Surprise, surprise, this is amazingly focused, with something approaching a plot and everything. Because a relatively stable foundation grounds the film, Tim and Eric's usual diversions manage to pack more punch for letting the nuances of their weirdness shine through. Every technical hiccup, awkward insert shot and flat line of dialogue delivered just a second too late creates a sense of discomfort like a low-frequency sound. I cannot explain why I find that effect hilarious, but then, the sight of John C. Reilly hacking up a lung as a Dickensian, wolf-raised orphan or Ray Wise presiding over a grotesque sort of body cleanse need no justification. Grade: B-

Rango

When the Rango trailer met with near-unanimous derision and dismissal among critics and, seemingly, audiences, I wonder if Gore Verbinski sat back and knowingly thought to himself, "To hell with it. They'll come crawling back when the time comes." If he did, he was right: Rango wastes no time announcing itself the first major mainstream release of the year, driven by a visual design unseen in any recent animated film that comes to mind and laced with a humor that never feels cheap or easy.

From its opening moments, Rango carries a mild sense of Dadaist whimsy, a mariachi band addressing the audience directly and introducing a character "who has yet to enter his own story." Cut to a flower-shirted chameleon going stir-crazy in a terrarium, organizing plays with the plastic objects littering his boxed home and even holding conversations with such props as a wind-up fish and a mock tree. Just as the lizard hits upon a new idea requiring an ironic twist for his protagonist, his masters' car lurches in traffic and sends the terrarium out of the foolishly open back window, stranding the domesticated creature in the middle of a harsh desert highway with a sun so hot a drop of water sizzles and evaporates on the tongue before it can even offer the tease of a quenched thirst. The poor beast shrivels up and partially crumbles twice in the rays.

At this point, the metafictional devices employed with the mariachi band and self-reflexive acting of the protagonist among his props gives way to outright surrealism, from a squashed armadillo carrying on a cryptic conversation with the lizard and sun-baked hallucinations allowing for some truly breathtaking yet hilarious animation. At last, our hero finds his way to a parched town called Dirt where he avoids a swift beating by taking the name Rango and putting his acting chops to the test with fanciful tales of gunslinging prowess.

Amazingly, Rango sidesteps the lazy appropriation of winking clichés seen in recent animated films, even as it eschews putting a toe into the Western genre pool for splashing in with a cannonball. This is the closest anyone has come to making a CGI Tarantino movie. Rango does not simply regurgitate pop culture, it embraces it, honoring conventions even as it pokes fun and adds new dimensions to them. Leone references dominate the landscape, from the use of a Morricone-esque score by Hans Zimmer to a likeness of the Man with No Name. The film also incorporates the work of Chuck Jones in its chaotic yet carefully composed animation, ensuring strict adherence of spatial relationships and perspective so that the sudden breaks are even more clanging, hilarious and daring. Verbinski even throws in a Fear and Loathing nod, recalling not only Hunter's own mad, hallucinogenic ride through the desert but Terry Gilliam, whose influence can be seen all over Rango's visual originality rooted in the work of others.

To even get into how gorgeous, how memorable and how singular the animation of Rango is would send this review down a dead-end street of superlatives. Who on Earth could have guessed from Rango's unalluring teaser that the primary influence on its visual scheme, even above classical Western imagery, would be the work of Salvador Dalí? To be fair, the animators left a hefty clue for the audience in the unimpressive frame of the protagonist. Rango, too weird to appeal in a trailer, works brilliantly in context: set against the startlingly realistic animation of the other animals, Rango visually clashes. His askew, pencil-thin neck supports his vast head like a glacial till holding up a balancing rock, and his slightly uneven eye sockets with narrowed nipples for peepers subtly resemble breasts. Only Rattlesnake Jake, a massive, coiling psychopath who comes to town to pop the bubble of Rango's inflated persona, matches Rango's off-kilter animation, what with his seemingly endless body and his machine-gun rattler.

The backdrops offer even more chances for innovative rendering. Hallucinations of terrifyingly symmetrical cactus configurations, slow-motion shots of a desert highway illuminates overhead by cars passing over the hero, and a transparently fake (and thus disgustingly recognizable) Las Vegas are but some of the masterful background animations in which Verbinski places his characters. Where Wes Anderson's inexperience with animation did not preclude him from dictating style and movement to his supposedly tortured team on Fantastic Mr. Fox, the less-mannered Verbinski appears to have reacted to his own unfamiliarity with the medium with humility, ceding artistic control to his animators. Amazingly, Rango fails to fall into the trap that entangled infamous examples of competing visions in animation (Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland comes swiftly to mind), maintaining a cohesive juxtaposition between surprising realism and the most brazen use of Dada in children's entertainment since the early brilliance of Spongebob Squarepants.

Of course, to say that assumes Rango could conceivably be seen as a kid's film, which it most emphatically is not. Though it sidesteps Tarantino's vulgarity, the sheer amount of adult-oriented pop culture references and film history on display offers nothing for a child, and most of the dialogue plays at, at the least, a teenage level. Only the slapstick could fully appeal to a child, but then physical comedy, when done well, is universal, and the comedy here is dynamite. And if the sophistication of the writing does not turn off the children, the sight of Rattlesnake Jake surely will, each lunge of his bared fangs or constricting coil around heroes terrifying enough to shake an adult. Those dismissing Rango for not being palatable to children (or praising it in spite of this "shortcoming") have grown too accustomed to the idea of animation being something that must appeal to children. Rango has just enough to keep a kid entertained -- and for the love of God, parents, let your kids get scared; it does 'em good -- but it clearly aims for an older audience.

Part of Rango's promotional package highlighted Verbinski's staging of the voice cast as if they were actually on-screen, filming them acting together in what seemed a desperate gimmick. Yet the move paid off, and Rango sports one of the voice casts of major stars to sound as if the actors did more than simply speak into the microphone. Bill Nighy properly sinks into his role as Jake, adding menace to his speech and not just his movement. An unrecognizable Isla Fisher plays Beans, the unfortunately named love interest who chatters in a contradictory mile-a-minute drawl shockingly familiar to those of us who have heard the slowed-down Southern accent as sped up by inflamed passions. And what a weird niche in which Ned Beatty has found himself, playing a crippled authority figure exuding false comfort and harboring ulterior motives in an animated film only a year after....well, you know.

Casting Rango, a delusional pet with aspirations of being a thespian, as a chameleon was a sly gag, and one Johnny Depp undoubtedly got. After the last two Pirates movies, the relationship between Depp and Verbinski went stale, to the point one could not easily recall how incandescent their first pairing was (and on a film preemptively dismissed as derivative and money-grabbing). They capture lightning in a bottle once more here, letting Depp exercise his most exuberant techniques without the setbacks of watching the actual man contort himself into buffoonish shapes for a laugh. Never appearing on-screen, Depp hasn't been so watchable in years.

Stuffed with allusions and surprises, Rango occasionally goes so far as to recontextualize its references and make something else out of them. A massive canyon chase not only combines elements of the podcast race and Death Star trench run of Episodes I and IV, respectively, it also adds a dash of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, albeit with bats. Three superb sequences combine into one visual tour-de-force that borrows the best aspects from all of them and plays around in the white space left over. At the other end of the spectrum, the film pokes fun at the stereotypes of Native Americans, the somber raven to whom Rango incessantly condescends always subverting expectations based on genre clichés (a reference to Depp's involvement in the thoroughly anti-cliché, anti-Western Dead Man, perhaps?). I also enjoyed the idea of a town so literally dry that, when the locals laugh at the naïve city slicker asking for water, they do so because they'd all love nothing more than a sip of the stuff instead of alcohol.

In a year where Pixar already seems to be planning a working vacation with Cars 2, Rango might survive in the public consciousness through the year and win some accolades come the next awards season. One can only hope; Rango is one of the few animated films to ignore Pixar entirely, either as competition or influence. The makers focused only on telling a good story in the way they saw it, and the results freely leap off the screen despite staying in obsolete ol' 2D. Intelligent, witty, original films of any stripe do not come along often, and to see something this bold come from the seemingly dessicated corpse of Nickelodeon Studios proves one should never count anyone out. The film circles around the idea that anyone can be a hero given the right circumstances and sense of perseverance and duty; Rango itself proves how dedication turns a decent concept into great art.

Shaun of the Dead

Inglourious Basterds so renewed my love for Quentin Tarantino that I find myself even going back to directors I can indirectly tie to him. For example, I went back to Breathless -- after all, Tarantino is the dumbed-down American version of the French auteur -- and finally connected with it, insufferable pretension and all. But if Godard inspired Tarantino, so too did Tarantino unleash a wave of imitators looking to score big in the post-Pulp Fiction "indie" scene. And if the transition saw tributes to philosophy and art give way to television and kung-fu movie send-ups, so too did the passing of the torch from the Weinsteins' golden boy to the next group of Sundance hopefuls result in a significant drop-off.

To be honest, the majority of, well I don't want to cheaply dismiss them as "clones" but sometimes that's an apt description, were simply awful. The one that will forever reach through the fog of my mind like the half-remembered nightmare that it is to haunt me in my quiet moments is of course Troy Duffy's nauseating effort The Boondock Saints, which apparently everyone I interact with loves because hell is truly other people. One of the few movies to mine the non-linear narrative and rapid-fire dialogue of Pulp Fiction successfully was Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a film so fun Ritchie got away with essentially making the same film twice with Snatch (admittedly, bringing on Brad Pitt as a nonsensical gypsy street fighter didn't hurt). But even Guy Ritchie failed to grasp that what made Pulp Fiction, and the rest of Tarantino's canon, so special was the utter joy that was tangible in every frame. Sure, Tarantino may muddle his morality until it's unclear whether he's reveling in his madness or using it to some method, but no one seemed to even try to figure that out. All the imitators, they just gleaned the surface and left out the glue that bound it together.

The chief exception to this is the team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. They made names for themselves with the superb Britcom Spaced, which Pegg wrote with Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson) and Wright directed; a glorious mix of film and television quotation (with some big homages to Tarantino, of course), Three's Company and Friends, Spaced is truly unlike any other series I've ever watched, with well-defined characters that never allowed themselves to be swallowed by the referential revelry. And for a series that so deeply mined geeky subjects like comic books and video games, it contained an effortless feminine touch courtesy of Hynes, who crafted her Daisy into someone just as nerdy as the fellas without calling any attention to herself, since *gasp* female nerds do exist.

After Spaced, Hynes went on to other projects, while Pegg and Wright took a bit from one of the episodes, in which Pegg's character has junk food-induced hallucinations of fighting zombies, and expanded it into what now must be acknowledged as a modern comedy classic. Its title suggests that Shaun of the Dead will be little more than a skin-deep parody of horror flicks à la the increasingly awful Scary Movie series, a cheap collection of pop culture references gleaned from whatever's hot in the tabloids or trash TV at the moment.

References certainly abound in the film, from the obvious cues to Romero's Dead series as well as works as diverse as James Cameron flicks, The Deer Hunter and the standard of film nerd quotation, Star Wars. There's at least one shot directly lifted from Halloween. But what Wright and Pegg understand about the zombie film is that zombies only work 1) in large numbers and 2) as satire. Danny Boyle's low-budget 28 Days Later fulfilled the second, but it got around the first by revising zombie rules to allow them to run, thus negating the need for large swarms. Shaun of the Dead also works on a small budget but, purists that they are, they found a way to cast swarms of extras to play the walking dead. Amazingly, despite the way in which every zombie appearance is turned into a gag of some sort, these throngs of zombies to pack some scares in them, because Wright and Pegg treat the subject seriously.

Wright spells out the satire of the film in the superb opening title sequence: in gentle tracking shots, he moves through the streets of London, touching on those who will soon fall to the outbreak, as they shuffle through streets completely indistinguishable from the zombies they're about to become. The titular protagonist, played by Pegg, plays like a projection of his Spaced character Tim, down to his directionless career path and vaguely homoerotic relationship with his best friend (played in both projects by Nick Frost). He's pushing 30 and working a job otherwise filled by teenagers looking for some pocket money on weekends, and he spends every night at a dusty old pub, much to the mounting outrage of his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield).

Pegg's slacker is the ideal protagonist for the film, as he personifies its underlying message. Already disaffected at work and incapable of concentrating on his relationship, Shaun responds to the realization of the outbreak by running back into his flat and turning on the television. When he finally decides on a course of action, he schemes to use the zombie plague to re-ingratiate himself with both his girlfriend and his mother (Penelope Wilton). Shaun slowly morphs into a capable leader over the course of the film, but the real focus is on Shaun's relationships with Ed, Liz and his mother Barbara, which works on both a sentimental and satiric level: it gives the film a more intimate feel even as it emphasizes the self-absorption and obliviousness of the current generation.

Now, listing off all the gags would be boring for both me and you, and I'd save time by just posting the screenplay, because barely any moment passes without something worth a laugh or at least the smirk of recognition that comes with spotting a reference. Even the sentimental moments have an underlying humor that makes the scenes funny without spoiling the severity of the moment. The best bit is, of course, the synchronized beating of a zombie to the tune of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now," a comic dance routine that has gotten a laugh out of me after a good eight viewings. But I'm also quite partial to an early scene before the outbreak, where Shaun attempts to fill in for his manager -- who ominously called in sick -- and finding himself terrified of his younger co-workers. The idea of intimidating teenagers is a holdover from Spaced, and the idea that, when a grown man is as much of a slacker as a teen, even the younger guys will mock him. I also enjoy Shaun's inability to shoot when he finds a gun late in the film: too many action and horror films give the ordinary man far too much an understanding of weaponry and fighting under stress.

If I have any complaint about Pegg and Wright's films, it's that their post-Spaced work lacks the understated feminism of that series. Granted, both Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz deconstruct the heterosexual male relationship and subvert the idea of the unstoppable masculine force, but I miss Hynes' touch. However, I noticed this time around -- my first viewing after watching Spaced -- that the women are the only ones who, for the most part, keep their heads in the situation. When Shaun fends off a zombie who attacks his mother, the women are the only ones who help him fight while the men stand idly by, either absorbed with their cell phones or too craven to act.

Like Tarantino, Wright isn't what you would call "subtle," but his frenetic style and frequent quotation is put to thematic use. His breakneck editing hysterically makes mundane activities such as brushing and cooking a light breakfast as action-packed as a shootout, but he also leaves items in the background that subtly recall other films without making a show of it. The equation of Shaun's uninteresting life with action via editing further emphasizes his banality even in an apocalypse, as well as, perhaps, his inflated opinion of himself; as Shaun must face truly horrible scenarios, Wright switches to filming in longer takes that remove the sheen from the first half and offer moments of reflection and cold reality. The film also excels because of its cast: Pegg and Wright must have won themselves quite a reputation with Spaced, because some big names signed on for the project. Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis of The Office have parts (Freeman appears in a cameo), as do Matt Lucas of Little Britain and Dylan Moran of Black Books. Even Bill Nighy turns up for a significant role as Shaun's stepdad. Every actor is perfect for the part, and the cameos manage to get all that name recognition in without distracting from the movie itself.

Their subsequent Hot Fuzz was more a thorough takedown of a genre, but Pegg and Wright crafted with Shaun of the Dead a movie built upon genre and references that somehow emerges totally original. Its seamless blend of romantic comedy and zombie film -- two genres so rigid in construction they practically come with rule books -- breaks the confines of both and makes a movie that is at once funny, meaningful, sentimental and spooky; it mixes the satire of Romero's Dead films with the over-the-top comedy of Evil Dead II, filtered through the impish charm of Spaced. Despite its grand climax, Shaun ends largely as it began, with the world getting back to normal, and the characters return to their lives of enslavement to television, which is changed insofar that the reality programs now have leftover zombies to fuel their concepts. For Shaun at least, this is a happy ending.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest became and remains Disney's most successful film in their history, grossing over $400 million in the United States alone and over a billion worldwide. Über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the filmmakers, unfortunately, interpreted this as some sort of mandate, that the tonal shift of the film drew audiences in, as opposed to the hype of seeing Johnny Depp. It's understandable, I guess; many people confuse box office gross with quality. Why, right after Transformers 2 came out, I found myself in an argument with someone who cited its high gross with proof that I was just being "difficult." Hell, Ben Lyons is a paid...I don't want to say professional who receives money for offering up thought about whether a film will make money or get Oscar noms and bases his opinion entirely on those two criteria.

Then again, the filmmakers clearly didn't underestimate the Depp factor, because they did the unthinkable with this movie: they gave us so much Johnny Depp that I finally didn't want to see any of him by the end of it. Trapped in Davy Jones' Locker after being devoured by the Kraken, Jack Sparrow is to spend eternity captaining a beached Pearl with a crew made entirely of copies of himself. These scenes allow Depp to be even crazier than usual, but they elicit no laughs, only glaces at watches. Perhaps Verbinski thought that drawing out these scenes to excruciating lengths would make them existentialist or at least deep in some way, but they are simply turgid.

"What exactly is going on here anyway?" you may ask yourself, unaware of what a mistake you just made, because the first hour of this insufferably long picture is all about endlessly, endlessly explaining things. Barbossa's back from the dead? Why? Because he's a pirate lord, and the pirate lords must all convene for the Brethren Court to combat Beckett, who know controls Davy Jones and, therefore, the seas. Barbossa never transferred his "lordship" to another, so he must attend regardless of living status. Jack didn't either, so he, Will, Elizabeth and the Pearl crew must travel to the edge of the world and beyond to save him. Wait, if Jack never passed on his piece of eight, how did Barbossa, a lowly first mate before he stole Jack's ship, become a lord? Oh, whatever.

The voyage to the beyond is disorienting and bewildering, and not even the wondrous special effects can distract you from trying to piece together the logic of these sequences. I can appreciate Verbinski trying to make something deeper than just a threequel for a movie about a ride, but damn it, where did the fun go? But they get Jack and all is well, at least until he hallucinates the other Jacks every now and again.

The second hour doesn't improve vastly on the first. Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat) is a wasted character who removes Elizabeth from the rest of the crew just so she can be promoted to pirate lord when this vacuous plot killer finally ventures down to Davy Jones' Locker himself. At least it provides Knightley with the opportunity to become a full-on ass-kicking machine. She reveals some half-decent comic timing, but you'll be too busy watching her fight to focus on it.

Knightley is one of the bright spots of the film, as is that worst-kept secret of Keith Richards' cameo. He barely has any lines at all, but he's such a natural I imagined him showing up on set already wearing the clothes he wore in the scene. "Oh, wow, you brought your own costume," Verbinski would have said. "What costume?" Richards growled quizzically. It didn't take a psychic to predict that Richards, the basis of Sparrow to being with, would work, but his too-brief (though perhaps just right) scene gives us a blast of fun that is so terribly missing in the rest of the film.

Occasionally, that darkness pays off, though. In the final 40 minutes, Verbinski and ILM throw everything under the sun at us. You've giant whirlpools, battles between not two or three ships but entire fleets, a marriage in the middle of swashbuckling. You've even got a woman-god who turns into a bunch of crabs, and for what else could anyone ask? It's a freewheeling marvel that contains all the fun of the first film and what patches of it there were in the second into one glorious package, only to end on a, frankly, brilliant and dark climax.

But those 40 minutes cannot salvage the nearly 2-1/2 hours that precede it. Even Davy Jones, so magnetic and sympathetic in the first film, actually becomes less interesting when the totality of his story is explained. Geoffrey Rush is a breath of fresh air as Barbossa, but he lacks the intimidation factor he had in the first and now does little more than play straight man to Depp. Bloom is on-screen for such a minute amount of time that I can scarcely remember seeing him only a few hours after watching it. Depp too, for all his clones, takes up far too small a percentage of the film's length, and that affects the film more than anything else.

When I sat down in the theater and endured this movie for the first time, I found myself so incensed by its interminable length and turgid exposition that I never watched any of the other films again. While I feel know that said reaction was harsh, I find myself only slightly more charitable now. At World's End is a bad movie. It's bad as a sequel and on its own. Elizabeth is the only one to walk out of the film more or even just as interesting as she was at the start, while formerly fascinating characters such as Jones and Jack are buried under exposition and self-parody. When Jack and Mister Gibbs recite the pirate code, "Take what you can, give nothing back" at the end of the film, it's hard not to think of Bruckheimer and Disney, letting Verbinski haphazardly throw in ponderous, arty elements to what should be nothing more than an action thrill ride, simply because they know the people will come.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

The first Pirates of the Caribbean was the biggest surprise hit in years, maybe since Titanic turned a cloying melodrama into the highest-grossing film of all time. A joyous blend of action, comedy and a tinge of romantic melodrama, it proved to be the best piece of escapist fun in years. It was its own nice, little, self-contained story, but I can't blame anyone for wanting to see more of Captain Jack Sparrow.

Unfortunately, the drive to make things bigger and better for a sequel resulted in a bloated, aimless affair that expands both the spectacle and the moments with no idea how to balance the two halves. It also makes the fatal mistake of believing that anyone cares about the mythology of this little world, as opposed to just wanting to have some fun. So, what might have been the creation of a seafaring Indiana Jones instead became an 18th century version of the Matrix saga.

Following the events of the first film, the East India Trading Company cracks down on piracy in its waters and sends Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) to Port Royal to clean up the place. A personification of ruthless imperialism and greed, Beckett will manipulate or kill anyone who stands in the way of profit. He arrives at port ordering the execution of Will and Elizabeth for aiding and abetting piracy. To make matters worse, he does this on their wedding day.

Beckett gives Turner a chance for redemption by offering to give pardons if he can retrieve the compass that led to the Isla de Muerta in the previous film. Turns out, it can also lead to a chest containing the heart of Davy Jones, captain of the Flying Dutchman, who ferries dead souls from the world of the living to his Locker. Jones, played by Bill Nighy, is a technical marvel. A monstrous amalgam of sea creatures, Jones has a crab claw and tentacles for a beard. All of this looks so realistic you'd swear he was wearing prosthetics with only a few digital touch-ups here and there, but it's all animated.

He's not the only beautifully rendered object in the film. His crew, also a hodgepodge of sea creatures -- the hammerhead shark man in particular catches the eye -- are covered in barnacles and starfish. The crew members who have served for decades are stuck in the very walls of the ship. The large-scale fights, too much though they may be, look flawless. Even the water effects look indistinguishable from shots taken on actual seas. ILM's work can be hit or miss -- their numerous innovations rub against sloppy work on such films as the Transformers series and the early Harry Potter installments -- but their work on Dead Man's Chest is among the very best CGI has to offer.

What a shame, then, that we must sit through so many scenes of exposition and backstory to pad out the length to an overlong 2-1/2 hours. The notion of Jack owing his soul to Davy Jones seems pointless, because it would appear that Jones claims all of the dead anyway. Would working on his ship really be that bad? And Will's dad serves on the Flying Dutchman? Death means so very little in this world. There is also an insufferable obeah priestess Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), who explicates heaps of mythology in a thick, manufactured, nigh-unbearable Jamaican accent.

This half-hearted stab at severity, however, does offer a few boons. Nighy excels as Jones beyond the shimmering CG, because we're given reasons to fear and care about him. There's a sadness in his eyes as he wanders the seas still grieving over lost love, and the wrath that pain engenders is fearsome. Norrington, disgraced after his failed attempts to capture Sparrow, appears in an alcoholic stupor before sobering up long enough to plan a path to redemption. Beckett himself is terrifying in his detached sadism: apart from his quest to reap revenge on Jack for some long-ago dust-up, he orders the deaths of large swaths of men with cold indifference.

Hollander and Nighy are wonderful, but the film hits a real snag with its star attraction, Johnny Depp. Depp, who was so energetic, fresh and unpredictable in the first film, has compacted Jack into a ready-made formula: sarcasm and bumbling idiocy give way to a meticulously thought out plan and yet more sarcasm. Perhaps he's just not as interesting now that we know him, now that we know the other shoe will drop for every dumb thing he does. It's not that Depp sleepwalks through the movie, but he just doesn't light up the screen like he did in Black Pearl.

On the plus side, Keira Knightley's part is much expanded, and she does a great job with it. No longer simply a damsel in distress, she actually sets out to save the guy when Will is trapped aboard the Dutchman. Most interestingly, the filmmakers decide to give her a dash of sexual tension with Jack, to great effect. Where her relationship with Will feels tepid and melodramatic, sparks fly instantly with the rakish pirate. You know it won't lead anywhere, but the give and take between the two is hysterical and exciting.

What makes Dead Man's Chest so interesting (and so infuriating) is the tonal shift of its fighting. The original drew on the madcap fencing beauty of Errol Flynn, but this is more Three Stooges than anything. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- the Stooges informed the action of Evil Dead 2 to great effect -- but it takes attention off the impressive dueling and places it onto ridiculous spectacles like fighting on a rolling wheel, or running away from cartoonish cannibals. Had these scenes been toned down and shaped into something exhilarating instead of vaguely comedic, Dead Man's Chest might have come close to the level of the previous film.

Nevertheless, it offers up enough fun and interesting characters (even a slightly subdued Depp steals the show without effort) to make it worth your money, especially if you have the Blu-Ray. I thought Black Pearl looked amazing, but this puts it to shame. Just watch the scenes with the kraken and you'll that, however much you spent on your Blu-Ray player, it was worth it. The film looks so gorgeous it actually improved in my estimation over the DVD. What once hovered around a 2.5 now gets a solid three stars for being that much more entertaining. Where Curse of the Black Pearl is a great action film period, Dead Man's Chest is more a lazy Sunday sort of picture. Now only one question remains: dare I go back to the end of the world?