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And it’s not as if Disney films have ever been all rainbows and Skittles. Whether it’s the off-screen shooting of Bambi’s mother, the appearance of the Wicked Witch as the old hag in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, old mama Dumbo being chained up, or even Pinocchio’s travails as a donkey boy, Disney animated films have never lacked for visceral terrors with which its audiences (especially young ones) can wrestle during the night-time hours. The live-action output tells a similar tale in some instances.

To wit: Upon encountering Treasure Island again in early 2009, a film I had almost no recollection of seeing as a child, I was quite taken aback with the level of violence and the intense action. The deaths are all bloodless, but for a 1950 production aimed at family audiences (and the first completely live-action Disney film), the body count is significantly high. I can imagine children being quite devastated (if not as confused and mind-blown as by the psychedelic trippiness of Alice in Wonderland the following year).

Or perhaps that’s the naïve statement, and the juvenile audiences of 60 years ago were as adept with processing the scurrilous pirate behavior on display there as those of this past decade were with the PotC trilogy (soon to be quadrilogy). I shudder to contemplate such a possibility. I consider Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End to be a fair number of things but engaging family entertainment and suitable derring-do for younger audiences are not among them.

Dead Man’s Chest is the toughest of the three to write about, in part because it strives so mightily to out-do its predecessor and only succeeds at falling short by about that much, and in part because it is inexcusably boring. I find it fairly ironic that Johnny Depp’s inventive and off-kilter performance in the first film, the one that gave studio executives night sweats and heart palpitations as they feared it would be off-putting to audiences, is completely and utterly overwhelmed by the plot machinations of the second film. It’s as if his reward for being bold and choosing to trust the audience to follow along, was a fatter paycheck and the chance to see that spark snuffed out. If it is hard to achieve spontaneity and quirkiness in the middle of $140 million worth of spectacle, it is damn near impossible at $225 million.

Normally, I might criticize a summer blockbuster for being all style and no substance or being all heart but no brains. Dead Man’s Chest comes in for criticism of a different sort. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio cram the film full of so much plot sturm und drang that it becomes overwhelming and wearying. It’s as if they were told not to worry about doing any story editing because there were more than enough millions to go around to make sure everything they wrote would get filmed. The bigger the spectacle the better.

Characters rush from one location to the next, back and forth between ships, and maneuver through so many shifting alliances that a scorecard would be helpful. (And yet, am I the only one who feels that each time the cast finds themselves on a desert island, the exact same one is used? It lends a dizzying Groundhog Day slant to the proceedings that proves exasperating since no one comments on it.) Meanwhile, great actors like Stellan Skarsgaard and Bill Nighy are hidden behind makeup and CGI.

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