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-

Miami Vice

One of the first reviews I wrote for this blog was of Michael Mann's hotly contested 2006 opus Miami Vice. I've since taken it down, as it was unfocused, sloppy and made points without fleshing them out or connecting them. I could cattily offer something pithy like, "Well, I guess it's appropriate, then, considering the subject," but A) that doesn't make it any less sloppy a review and B) I'm not so sure I can so easily dismiss Miami Vice with such a flippant comment. I did save the post, and my general impressions can be summed up as such: I enjoyed the gunfights -- this is a Michael Mann film -- but I found the story muddled, the characters flat and the film overall too long by a third.

After reacquainting myself with Mann's films and visiting some for the first time, however, I return to Miami with an altered perspective. It's easy to take Mann at face value when you first watch his films: compared to the other crime-minded writer-directors of our time -- Quentin Tarantino and David Mamet -- Mann eschews flowery prose for blunt, technical dialogue, fussing over the details while blitzing through lines in a way that would do Howard Hawks proud. However, if we slow down to consider those details -- both written and visual -- we see not a director merely obsessed with how things are done but why people do them. As two-dimensional as so many of his characters are, he makes them real through his ability to capture fantastic performances by actors both strong and weak as well as his thorough knowledge of the tics and quirks of the people he creates. Mood, above all else, matters in a Mann film, despite the visceral thrill of Heat's epic shootout and the gripping tension of The Insider and Collateral: buried in the tension are the characters' reactions to what occurs to them, not simply narrative movement but personal growth and adaptation.

Above his other films (or at least the ones I've seen -- there's a gap between Thief and The Last of the Mohicans), Miami Vice elevates mood over any other aspect of the storytelling. Combined with Mann's deliberately blurred, dirty aesthetic, Miami Vice, to my utter amazement, completely undermines the glitz and glamor of the original, Mann-produced television series (possibly the most quintessentially "80s" piece of popular entertainment with its broad appropriation of New Wave music and dress and its celebration of economic self-love of Armani suits and Ferraris) that it becomes the opposite. It runs so far in the other direction, placing emphasis on mood and grime over plot-heavy procedural and gloss, that it might just be the film to get your Michael Bay-loving frat buddy into impressionism, and if that does not make it a great film it certainly warrants a closer inspection than many of its viewers (myself included) have afforded it.

The first immediately apparent stylistic shift from the show's aesthetic sheen is Mann's willingness to paint Miami as a bit of a carelessly painted-over dump. In his documentary traversing the United States, British author/comedian/actor/renaissance man Stephen Fry found much to love about our country, save for an uproariously brief tour through Miami, which Fry cut short because he so detested it: "It has that feeling of being designed as a holiday paradise," he says of the beach area, "and, indeed, all the dreary things that go with the word 'paradise' -- like palm trees and huge cut-out parrots -- that promise so much and deliver so staggeringly little." Of the city itself, he drawls, "Surely it must have a heart and a soul and a meaning and a kind of delightful center or something, but I've yet to find it."

Mann seems to agree with this assessment of the two distinctly different yet wholly off-putting cityscapes of the Miami-Dade area: the director wrenches the dirty aesthetic of Collateral's night-time hell into the light, an effect analogous to picking up a date in a crowded, dark nightclub and bringing him or her into broad daylight to see the horrible truth of the person you thought was so slick under a blacklight and now realize was nothing more than a photo negative. His color palette is dominated by a jaundiced yellow; the phrase "this city is dying" typically belongs in the realm of comic books, but by applying it through the visuals Mann subtly communicates the disease spreading through Miami, all the while using this color scheme to undermine the hollow allure of the city.

Mann's affection for authentic speech can prove difficult initially, as each film brings with it its own lexicon, even though he treads in the crime drama so often that one might expect some constants. The initial round of dialogue in the first 15 minutes of Vice is as abstract and baffling as the blurred, ultra-grainy cityscape around the characters who speak it: we recognize Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Rico Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) by name, but we learn nothing of them as they mingle in a party working a prostitution sting. Suddenly a man, a former informant named Alonzo (John Hawkes) calls Sonny and frantically mentioning something about his wife and getting out of town. As Crockett and Tubbs track him down, they learn that he went from ratting to them to informing for the FBI. Alonzo is desperate to pick up his wife and leave, but Tubbs receives a call and solemnly informs the compromised informant, "You don't need to go home."

You can almost snap your fingers to the dialogue in this opening blast, each line spewed out with the curt professionalism of people who have little time to waste. Somehow, Mann's camera manages to outpace it, cutting to a group of dealers springing a trap for an undercover agent before revealing that Alonzo sold out the Feds and showing cops reaching Alonzo's house and seeing a pair of legs on the ground with blood pooling beside them through the windows before Tubbs gets the call. By showing us what's about to be discussed Mann lets us mull over these images in the few seconds, processing it viscerally and emotionally without the hampering effect of words telling us how to interpret what we've seen. While it obviously bears ties to the original TV show and its digital camerawork recalls Collateral, perhaps the best base of comparison in Mann's prior corpus is The Last of the Mohicans: it too works best when nothing was being said at all, and it uses deceptively flat characters and dialogue to evoke atmosphere.

Narratively, Miami Vice is a curious beast: it moves so quickly you start to wonder if the copious amount of powdered substances somehow rubbed into the film itself and gave it a jump start (it might explain the grain, which is downright snowy at times), yet nothing much seems to progress. The film touches upon nearly every cliché in the book: Crockett and Tubbs infiltrate the drug cartel after Alonzo's confessions compromised spies across all federal agencies and leaves only the MDPD with a chance to go undercover, and soon Crockett gets so deep he begins to lose himself (the conceit of a principled man losing sight of his code a major theme of Mann's work). He falls for Isabella (Gong Li, a bit of casting that seems a cheeky art touch until Mann explains in the commentary that Cuba has a thriving Chinese community), who helps run the Colombian cartel and is a consummate businesswoman who nevertheless allows herself to love Crockett back. Many such tropes are not only shown by directly stressed in dialogue that, for another writer, would smack of poor construction and on-the-nose distrust in the visuals to communicate obvious developments; in Mann's hands, however, they become targets to be set up and shot down, slicing cliché to ribbons with volleys of his trademark gunfire. He lets us feel Crockett's confusion instead of moving from plot device to plot device. Isabella does not let her relationship with Sonny compromise her identity, and she maintains a focus on her job until the end, with only a quiet moment of pain that comes with the inevitable realization of Sonny's true occupation.

As the plot herks and jerks around to the whims of its alternating digital and film shots, Mann focuses instead on his impressionistic, often existentialist world. Miami Vice is about shots of its characters gazing out on the ocean and painterly skies, the digital photography allowing the director to capture objects in such extreme background that even the objects in the fore, while still in focus, begin to lose definition: at any moment they could diffuse into the grain that breaks them up, or into the ghostly lights of streetlamps, boat beacons, helicopter spotlights and lightning crackles across the sky. Those existential stares across the ocean find counterpoints in Mann's equation of our beings with the blood within us: he gives brief pause to shots of the pool of blood beside the feet of Alonzo's wife, the streak left when Alonzo then jumps in front of a big rig in grief, a splatter on a wall, the pink mist that arises from headshots (a reference to the great impressionist Renoir's use of pink, perhaps?) and the familiar sight of blood hitting the camera lens, but with the added twist of Mann then turning the camera to catch the light and explode in lens flares made from the splatter, as if capturing freed souls.

All of this is not to say that Miami Vice lacks Mann's typical attention to detail -- note the scene where Crockett and Tubbs meet Montoya, the real leader of the cartel, revealing Yero to be just a lieutenant and Isabella his superior: Tubbs focuses on the kingpin, while Crockett only has eyes for Isabella, and Mann gives us close-ups of Montoya and Isabella's matching watches, suggesting to him a romantic connection but later revealing how powerful Isabella herself is -- but, as an impressionistic work, it cares more for movement, capturing outlines and emotional perception over contours and "truth." Its sex scenes are as randomly placed and haphazardly justified as any other action movie, but the scenes between the leads and their ladies reveal more about the four characters than anything in the dialogue: in the case of Tubbs and Trudy's (Naomie Harris) scene, Tubbs' joke about climaxing early reflects the entire narrative structure of the film: a state of constant pre-ejaculative frenzy and abandon.

A dirty, snowy, sickly film, yes, Miami Vice nevertheless contains a perverse beauty: the digital photography allows for extreme detail in all its grain, such as a shot of a .50 cal bullet tearing through a car seat and revealing the minor flare of the small fire it causes in the seat's lining. I'm beginning to think that all of Mann's films need at least two viewings to fully process (expect a second post on Public Enemies in the near future), but none of his films has benefited so drastically from a rewatch as this, and I find myself in the shocking position of conceding that Miami Vice, by God, might truly be the masterpiece its supporters claim it is after all.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

What a shame it is that the only exposure the average American has to Steve Coogan is in his over-the-top, cartoonish persona as evidenced in Tropic Thunder (where his appearance was mercifully cut brief) and Hamlet 2. Those who have a taste for British comedy, however, know the real Coogan, a comic performer of supreme talent whose Alan Partridge occupies a part of the Holy Trinity of Britcom Characters with Basil Fawlty and David Brent. While his American roles seem to take his gift for Peter Sellers-esque mimickry and expand them too far beyond the realm of believability, back home he can contain his mania enough to wring some damn fine satire out of goofballs.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story marks Coogan's second feature with director Michael Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce; his first, 24 Hour Party People, sent up the Manchester music scene with fourth-wall-breaking self-reflexivity. All the more appropriate, then, that they should choose for their second collaboration to adapt The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a comic faux-autobiography that deviates into digressions and asides more often that it stays on-topic. Fittingly, their adaptation spends more time focusing on the making of the film than it does with anything involving Tristram Shandy.

If you want a capsule review, here's as basic as it gets: take Adaptation and replace the cast with British comic heavyweights. But where Charlie Kaufman used metafiction to probe the anxiety of writer's block, Coogan and co. use their "unfilmable" novel to comment on the vain politics of movie sets and the British film industry in relation to Hollywood. Coogan is set to star in the title role of the period piece, but he enters into a bizarre sort of warfare with co-star Rob Brydon as the constant re-writes shift the majority of screen time to and from each of the leads.

Brydon and Coogan play these office politics fairly straight, but the nature of the film allows them to inject more "actorly" performances into what appear to be fly-on-the-wall moments. Brydon, almost completely unknown in the States, proves an able foil for Coogan's self-absorbed version of himself: where Coogan is trying to parlay his television success into a film career as Shandy, Brydon acts the dope, always nervous to be surrounded by some of England's finest talent even as he demonstrates a subtle understanding of the game an actor must play on-set. In one of the film's funniest recurring gags, Brydon amuses the crew with his impression of Coogan which, to Coogan's mounting frustration, isn't even an impersonation of him but of his Alan Partridge character, the character he's trying to get away from with the film.

For a script that calls for such madcap plot distortion, Tristram Shandy has a remarkable feel for such character moments. Coogan is so wrapped up in the stress of the shoot, his power struggle with Brydon and the added strain of having a baby that he can't indulge in any passion for his wife Jenny (Kelly Macdonald), but he has more than enough libido to woo, um, Jennie (Naomie Harris). Jennie is attractive, yes, but so is Jenny, and Harris plays Jennie as a cineaste several leagues beyond Coogan in an understanding of the craft. She has a Fassbinder obsession, which a clueless Coogan tries to exploit as a connection, and it almost works: shes asks him what his favorite Fassbinder film is, then mentions Schatten Der Engel. "Is that the one with all the sex?" Coogan asks her (as well as the five people in any theater who might understand just how hilarious that line is in the context of Fassbinder's oeuvre). Other characters pop up here and there, fully developed or deliciously warped visions of their real selves, all of whom perpetuate the stereotypes of behind-the-scenes egomania even as they bring their own quirks to the roles.

If the film has any major flaw, it's that it spends so little time with the actual Tristram Shandy aspect of the story. As unfilmable as the novel may have been, the early scenes, wherein Coogan's Shandy narrates his birth -- there's even a production snafu involving placing Coogan inside of a mock womb to make the narration that much more absurd -- and criticizes the child actor who plays his young self (within the film-within-a-film's diegetic world where the kid can hear him). It's a shame that, after spending nearly 20 minutes in Shandy's birth scene, a serious depiction of the agony of childbirth protracted until it morphs into a belly-aching "Simpsons rake gag" piece of brilliance that repeats something so far beyond any possible moment of humor until it suddenly becomes funnier than ever.

I didn't know what to expect from Tristram Shandy before I popped it in my DVD player. Having become so accustomed to Coogan only shining in minor roles, even cameos, as of late, I feared that he might fail as the lead. Have no fear: this is Coogan in top form, with a script that scores at least one laugh per scene and a supporting cast filled with talented stars such as renaissance man and my own personal man crush Stephen Fry to Gillian Anderson, who sparks off uproarious asides as her introduction solves all of the production woes (the British backers suddenly agree to finance everything when an American actress, who had hit a post-X Files dry spell at the time, is added to the cast) as well as driving the fantasies of the cast and crew, all of whom turn out to be big fans of Agent Scully. I don't if I can agree with Stephen Fry's character when he proclaims the whole thing "a cock and bull tale, the finest of its kind I've ever heard," but Tristram Shandy is so stuffed to the gills with in-jokes, metajokes, and just plain surface-level comedy that I'll be coming back for more in the near future.

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)

Fans of Alex Garland's cult novel The Beach must have scratched their heads when Danny Boyle's adaptation essentially cut out the horrific last act when the beach community goes mad. Garland must have been confused as well, for he supplied the director with a script containing nothing but rage-filled, zombiesque creatures.

Now before I lose some people, let me address the zombie aspect of the film. I'm no horror expert, but the original George A. Romero Dead trilogy (why oh why couldn't he leave well enough alone?) and Max Brooks' recent, spellbinding novels The Zombie Survival Guide and the schlock masterpiece World War Z remain some of my favorite entries of either medium. I know the rules well: the zombie disease -- be it a virus, radiation, or some mystic curse -- spreads through blood and saliva. Those infected stand no hope of recovery. To kill a zombie, you must destroy the brain; decapitation will stop the body, but the head can still bite. Once a human has turned, he or she will never emit an emotional response, will never somehow remember a relative who begs for life by attempting to reach the loved one they once knew. Most importantly, zombies don't run.

28 Days Later follows several of these guidelines loosely, but it loses people in the running. I, for one, had no problem with it; what Garland and Boyle have created is a revisionist zombie flick, a Romero film for the post-9/11 era. Obviously, Romero eventually made his own "Romero films for the post-9/11 era," but Boyle's hyper-kinetic, gripping thriller vastly outstrips either of Romero's entries into his trademark franchise this decade.

Furthermore, not even Romero sticks to the "proper" formula: the zombies in Night of the Living Dead can run, and we all remember the humanized zombie Bub from Day of the Dead (as well as "Big Daddy" in Land). John A. Russo, co-writer of Night, eventually teamed up with Dark Star and Alien scribe Dan O'Bannon to create a more lightweight zombie franchise which broke damn near all the rules. Dismissing 28 Days Later, a film that doesn't even refer to its bloodthirsty mobs as "zombies," for not following a set of arbitrary rules established by fans of the genre when some of its most notable touchstones veer wildly as well strikes me as little more than fanboyish rage.

Shot mainly with grainy digital cameras, 28 Days Later has a docudrama feel that total first-person experiences such as Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead fail to communicate. Even with gorgeous, haunting establishing shots of a vacant London -- you have to admire and wonder how a film with a paltry £5,000,000 budget could co-ordinate cordoning off large blocks of the city for extreme long shots of total desolation, even if only for a few days of shooting -- breaking the personal feel of the action, Boyle invites us into this world, and a truly nightmarish one it is.

Following a prologue involving an outbreak of scientifically infected monkeys, the film shifts forward, well, guess how long, to focus on a young man waking up from a coma following a car accident. Jim (Cillian Murphy, in his breakout role) stumbles out of his hospital bed to find an abandoned building. The streets of London are likewise barren, until he walks into a church and finds a stack of dead bodies. Some of them stir at the noise he makes, and now the poor lad (still in a hospital gown, no less), must run from insane, fleet-footed killers who dart about as fast as humanly possible.

A group of survivors saves him, and they offer up some much-needed explainin': following the chimp outbreak, a mysterious virus known only as "Rage" swept through Britain, as infection spreads through even a drop of blood in an open wound, mouth or eyes, and any hapless victim covered in the red stuff turns in under 20 seconds. Once turned, they attack anything that moves with unrelenting ferocity. Jim joins the two survivors who rescue him -- what choice does he have? -- and soon finds himself in the sort of despair you'd expect from someone who woke up to the apocalypse. Eventually they run low on supplies and set out through London, searching for anything or anyone who might help them survive.

The real horror of 28 Days Later comes not from the infected but their after-effects. It is genuinely unsettling to see a handful of people move through a desolate metropolis. I suppose the city really should have teemed with infected, but I would hazard a guess that Boyle was doing good just to shut down parts of London for shooting, much less paying hundreds of extras (all of whom would need decent make-up) for every exterior shot. The infected are not interested in eating flesh, only attacking, and it's chilling to watch one of the few human survivors sprayed in the face with blood either vomited by the infected or (more disturbingly) spurted by wounds that the human inflicts to stop the rampaging beast.

Selena (Naomie Harris), a steely, kickass black woman ripped straight from The Omega Man, knows all too well what it means when an infected spills some blood on a person, and when she spots a gash on her comrade's arm created by one of the Ragers, she cuts him apart with a machete without a moment's hesitation. He's the first of the characters to fall prey to this fast-acting disease, but he sure isn't the last.

Of course, horror doesn't mean much if the characters afflicted by monsters/killers/insanity do not connect with the audience. Even if we're never meant to root for a character or get much of an insight into them (think Repulsion), we have to care on some level about the people on screen. Garland's script succeeds because he gives us people who have their own issues and personalities outside of dealing with the Rage threat. Selena and Jim happen upon Frank (Brendan Gleeson, stealing the show as ever), a kindly but strong single parent desperately trying to give his young daughter Hannah (Megan Burns) a shred of normalcy even as they are barricaded in their flat.

Of course, the raison d'être for most great zombie films is sociopolitical allegory, and 28 Days Later treads this path as well. After overhearing a radio transmission promising "the answer to infection," the foursome makes their way to a compound controlled by a small band of soldiers led by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston). West's "answer" is to hole up until the infected die of starvation, then to rebuild civilization; one day, he takes Jim aside and tells the now-steeled survivor that he sent out the transmission to give his despondent squad hope and he "promised them women."

The readiness of the soldiers to rape Selena and the teenage Hannah is forced -- I figured they'd want at least some semblance of a human connection outside of sex -- but the martial law of West illustrates a point hammered home with amusing repetition in The Zombie Survival Guide: in most cases, surviving humans pose more of a threat to each other than the zombies. Eccleston puts in a fine performance as, in many ways, a foil for Frank: he's trying to keep his soldiers -- a surrogate family -- going and sees procreation as much an avenue to bring them back from the brink as it is "necessary" to keep humanity going. That only Great Britain suffers from this outbreak, at least according to the most sympathetic soldier, only reveals how mad West has become in his attempts to literally hold down the fort.

The insanity of West's compound sets up an inevitable confrontation between the soldiers and the civilians, but 28 Days Later hits a bit of a snag in the end. Basically, a royally pissed off Jim tears through the complex to save Selena and Hannah and generally acts in a manner just as terrifying as the infected who swarm about the place. There's an interesting theme there that Garland and Boyle, suddenly salivating over the violence like men possessed, do not explore. It especially looks bad in a coda that was re-written after an original, bleaker, and infinitely superior (because it actually works) ending drew negative response at test screenings, that most useless of industry tools. This new ending offers hope, but it directly contradicts the rest of the film and its lack of any organized government, military, religion or any other social institution. Again, that might have been a suitably dark and contemplative direction, showing that both the soldiers and civilians tore each other apart when help might have been on the way, but the poor filmmakers had to make a forced happy ending that rewards these characters for their bloodlust.

Nevertheless, even the final act contains enough full-tilt action to keep your pulse-pounding no matter how reactionary it is. Boyle's grainy, jumpy footage ratchets up the tension even as I found precious little that scared me (I have a strange tendency not to be scared by horror films I like, as I'm "too busy" admiring them). I also appreciate the dark humor of a group of animal rights activists unwittingly causing the outbreak in their attempts to free monkeys, rather than the carelessness of clinical scientists. Garland has a history with mocking the counterculture (i.e. The Beach), but I think that Boyle at least subconsciously wanted to demonstrate that well-meaning people can bring about massive destruction; after all, the scientists who always set something loose in these sorts of films are usually working toward something good and noble.

28 Days Later may divide zombie fans, but I for one delighted in all the nods to Romero's films: a Bub-like infected man under study, an attack in a decrepit gas station, the ruthless military vs. civilians. Boyle wears his influences on his sleeve, and he and Garland crafted a thoroughly enjoyable, somewhat thoughtful meditation on how man can lose himself in hysteria and anger, released in the wake of both September 11 and the SARS panic. It loses steam at the end, but 28 Days Later is more than a respectable entry into the horror genre, and its gritty look set off a wave of inferior imitators just as Romero's zombie satires did decades ago.

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?