In fact, if anyone’s presence in the film marks a significant shift for the franchise, it’s Jack Sparrow. Rewatch Black Pearl and Dead Men Tell No Tales back to back and the difference in his personality is jarring, the character no longer a real master of wordplay who feels as unpredictable as he is smart, always five steps ahead of everyone around him. Jack’s fallen a long way over the course of five films, and Dead Man’s Chest, while not as egregious as its successors, does regrettably nudge the character ever so slightly down the path of becoming the clown he is of late.
The comparison has been made countless times, but it’s such an apt one that it can’t be avoided: Jack Sparrow was to Black Pearl as Han Solo was to the original Star Wars, a character meant to exist in the grey area between good and evil, a fact that made both of them so popular because they were free to be wild cards in someone else’s story. The first three Pirates films are very much Will and Elizabeth’s tale, and one of the many failings of On Stranger Tides was the attempt to make Jack the lead, diluting the character’s rogue personality in order to make him a straightforward hero. To the credit of Dead Man’s Chest, it doesn’t let the popularity of Jack Sparrow smother itself like it so easily could have, but it also couldn’t entirely avoid the fact that people wanted more of him following Black Pearl.
Though he’s still armed with some quick wit, Sparrow in Dead Man’s Chest feels like a backward slide from who he was in the first film, the character engaging in more goofy antics that only serve to make him a punchline that’s hard to take seriously, from tumbling down a flight of stairs while bragging about his jar of dirt to falling into a grave to getting conked in the head during a battle late in the pic. Depp’s performance is still great, and the character is still immensely quotable – the “I love those moments. I like to wave at them as they pass by” exchange is great – but he’s presented as more of a buffoon this time around in a way that doesn’t entirely do the dangerous scalawag of the first film justice.
A fun sequence on the island of Pelegostos, where Jack has been elevated to god status by a tribe of cannibals, results in the character attempting to escape while still tied to the tree he was to be roasted on. It starts off fine, as he looks for a way to free himself from the inconvenience, then shifts into a fight against two women that results in him becoming a human kabob, and ends with the character falling hundreds of feet down a chasm, smashing through several rope bridges along the way, only to land on his back and walk away just fine.
It’s this moment that sticks out for all the wrong reasons. For one, the unbelievable physics of it is off-putting, because it feels more at odds with everything the films had established to that point than any amount of supernatural content could. Secondly, it shifts Jack from being a man who makes his own luck into a man who seemingly gets by only because of luck. And, lastly, it represents one of Dead Man’s Chest’s real faults: Its occasional inability to restrain itself and end a sequence before it overstays its welcome.
The overall detour onto Pelegostos, for example, feels like it could’ve benefited from a trim of five to ten minutes, with Jack and his crew’s escape from the island feeling as much a relief to them as it is for us that the film can finally get back on track. Even the sequence at the end that features the Kraken attacking the Black Pearl feels like it drags on too long, particularly since we’d already been through another Kraken-related sequence earlier in the film. It’s a problem that would plague the sequels that followed as well, and much more so, but it has to be acknowledged here for needlessly slowing down the movie to its detriment.