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PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST - REVIEW

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After the resounding success of The Curse Of The Black Pearl , director Gore Verbinski and the original cast returned with a sequel to the Disney ride-based blockbuster franchise and it was even more successful at the box-office despite critics giving it lukewarm reviews. Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest introduced audiences to a new cursed pirate crew led by octopus-faced villain Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and gave us more Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), which made sense at the time seeing how popular the character was. The plot is almost as straight-forward as the original film's with Jack, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) all somehow finding themselves at sea looking for a key and a chest in order to steal Davy Jones' disembodied heart. Simple enough to grasp in a short synopsis but in practice, this sequel increasingly juggles plot threads without actually moving things forward leaving you to wonder why the plot is stagnating. T

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES - VLOG 12/06/17

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My thoughts on Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales .

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL - REVIEW

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Before Disney decided to remake all of its classic animated films in a big way, the studios turned to theme park rides for inspiration (as you do) and picked one of their oldest and most popular to adapt into a big budget feature film. And so we got Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl . The 2003 supernatural swashbuckler would, of course, become a significant success and spawn several sequels but we really didn't know what to expect from this first instalment. The pirate genre hadn't exactly been a hit in a while, if ever, so this was a risk for Disney. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Gore Verbinski, The Curse Of The Black Pearl was by no means a cheap, small scale project but the risk paid off in the end. The plot sees Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), the daughter of a wealthy Governor, help rescue young shipwrecked pirate Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) during a sail. She finds a golden medallion around his neck and decides to keep it. Ye

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES - REVIEW

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Jack Sparrow returns in this new Pirates of the Caribbean spin-off which finally discards of Keira Knightley and Mr Bloom to focus on Depp's very own adventure on the search for the Fountain of Youth. Director Gore Verbinski is replaced by Rob Marshall so this looked set to be a very different movie indeed. Well, different in an...exactly the same sort of way... To be fair you've got new faces: Penelope Cruz, Ian McShane, some mermaid, some priest... But even they feel familiar. The priest/mermaid lovey-dovey stuff is pure Keira/Orlando nonsense, McShane's Black Beard stands in for Bill Nighy's Davy Jones and Cruz is a 3 dimensional version of a tougher Keira Knightley we've seen in the previous Pirates movie. Story-wise, you've got no less than 4 teams of people (pirates, Spanish people, Barbossa...) all hunting down the Fountain of MacGuffins but of course there's plenty of double-crosses, magic and pointless rules on the way. Why one can't sim