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But he cannot stand up to the surrounding special effects, which involve Jack and his friends (played by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley) with serried ranks of ghostly apparitions, variants on similar figures in the first Pirates. They look as if they were recruited from the Star Wars cantina (although with even worse skin conditions), and they are as unfunny as they are undead. They are supposed to appeal to the movies' last remaining reliable audience--adolescent males--and doubtless they will (Dead Man's Chest sold an estimated $55 million in tickets on its opening day). But while special effects can startle and wow us, they almost never help us laugh.
Great physical comedians are a rare and perpetually endangered species. They require delicate handling. One remembers Jim Carrey emerging so brilliantly in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the leap he caused the heart to take. When he permitted his dear self to be submerged in special effects (as in Bruce Almighty), that heart quailed and shrank. And a grownup, remembering the mirthful Depp charge of the first Pirates, is bound now to worry about him.
Depp famously based Jack's appearance on Keith Richards, but Depp is a devotee of Chaplin as well, and Depp has it in him to be as subversive as the old master was. But he needs the austerity of surroundings--underpopulated and plain--in which all great comics function best. In the end, comedy is about exposing the individual's quaking, quacking, ultimately triumphant soul. But special effects are just machinery, by definition heartless and brutally domineering. They squash individuality. In the movies--and not only in comedy--they have come to symbolize much that is grossly extravagant and feckless in our el grande culture.