In preparation for the sequel, subtitled Dead Man’s Chest, I decided to take another look at the original on DVD. Maybe I was wrong, I thought to myself. A second viewing showed the film to be a little more charming than I remembered, but my overall opinion didn’t change. It was just okay for me. I liked Dead Man’s Chest even less. The difference is that even though the film is a foregone box office smash, I have a feeling that more people are going to agree with me this time.

Everybody’s back: Orlando Bloom as heroic Will Turner, Keira Knightley as the lovely Elizabeth Swann, and Johnny Depp as wacky Capt. Jack Sparrow. What’s weird is that the first thing the screenplay does is separate the main characters. This has the effect of causing the story to go in three separate directions at the same time. As Ali G would say, check it: Will and Elizabeth have been arrested and sentenced to death for helping Sparrow get away in the original, but Will is offered a pardon if he can steal a compass from Sparrow, so he sets off to the find the captain, who is trying to outrun a curse that’s been placed on him by the undead Davy Jones, and the only way to break the curse is to locate a hidden treasure chest containing Jones’s heart, and meanwhile Elizabeth escapes from prison and tries to find Will, who is trying to find Jack, who is trying to find the chest before Davy can find and enslave him.

My high school English teacher would kill me for writing a run-on sentence like that, but it’s the only method I could think of to convey how frantic the movie’s narrative is. To be honest, so much is going on all at once that I often got confused as to what was happening and why. It doesn’t help that the sequel tries to find room for every single character who was in the original, so there are numerous other little subplots involving Jack’s crew, Elizabeth’s former suitor Norrington (Jack Davenport), a mining company, and the Governor (Jonathan Pryce). New characters are added too, including Will’s father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgard).

The bloat is so great that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest runs an unconscionable two-hours-and-thirty-five minutes. Like the Energizer bunny in an eyepatch, it just keeps going and going and going. And then it goes some more. The original was long too, but it was breezy enough that the extended running time was little more than a mild annoyance. This time, though, I wanted to scream for the movie to just wrap it up already!

I’ll admit that the film is intermittently amusing, but it also reeks of the dreaded “bigger, louder, more” syndrome that has undone many a sequel. Anything that was charming about the original has been amped up here. For instance, there were some clever special effects in the original; the sequel is loaded with wall-to-wall effects that swallow up everything in their path. The original had a witty, offbeat performance from Johnny Depp; Dead Man’s Chest has so much of Capt. Jack Sparrow that he wears out his welcome. The Curse of the Black Pearl featured old-fashioned scenes of swashbuckling; this one takes the action way over the top with scenes that go on and on.

There’s only one word to describe this movie: overkill. It’s too much of too much. I felt worn down and mostly bored by it all.

Some elements showed promise. There’s a funny chase scene on an island, for example, that displayed wit. I also liked Davy Jones and his undead crew. They’ve been underwater for so long that they’ve started resembling sea creatures. Davy himself has the head of a squid, another guy has the head of a hermit crab, and a third looks like a hammerhead shark. Bootstrap Bill has a starfish and some seaweed perpetually stuck to his face. These characters are at least inventive and fun to watch. (Too gross for small children, though, so parents beware.) I also had a strange affection for the giant octopus that occasionally pops up from the ocean depths to attack a pirate ship. That’s pretty original.

Strangely, there is a 20-minute span near the end when Dead Man’s Chest suddenly gets really good. Will and another character duel while running atop an out-of-control waterwheel. As this is going on, Elizabeth, Sparrow, and several others are all trying to steal the heart from each other. It’s an extended farcical sequence that represents what the movie should have been from start to finish.

You may have heard that the third Pirates adventure was shot at the same time that this one was. Like The Matrix Reloaded, which was also shot in tandem with its third installment, Dead Man’s Chest ends with kind of a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved until the next sequel, tentatively set for Memorial Day 2007. Also like The Matrix Reloaded, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is a self-indulgent, overlong, not-as-fun-as-it-oughta-be chore to sit through. I like the actors, the creatures, and some of the other individual elements, but truth be told, I was glad when the movie was over.

( out of four)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of adventure violence, including frightening images. The running time is 2 hours and 35 minutes.