There's only one fair measure of a pirate movie: does it make you want to be a pirate? And Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest may do that. But you're just as likely to stagger out of the theater with a different occupational ambition: film editor. By Poseidon's beard, this movie is long. And somewhere in the vague recesses of memory, one recalls that the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, long since dubbed a classic if the costumed hordes at last night's opening are to be believed, was not exactly swashbuckling trim itself.
    Still, that first film had a charm that Dead Man's Chest finds in somewhat shorter supply. Some of Pirates 1's appeal probably came from low expectations, but the rest was pure Johnny Depp. And indeed, it's delightful to see that oddball mincing across the deck again; oddly, though, the filmmakers seem not to have realized how much the original Pirates rested on him. Where they might have shifted the story to focus on Depp, they instead spin out an extremely twisty yarn — a whole sweater, really — with about the same focus as the first film. Dead Man's Chest follows its swarthy company into conflict with Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), a squid-faced revenant from the bottom of the sea. Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) meets his late father. Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) contends with the encroaching grasp of the East India Company. A dozen other subplots wriggle like tentacles. Disposable characters and plotlines impinge on Johnny Depp time. Where are those scissors?
     Credit to Disney: they've made the mental editing game harder than usual. Even the most unnecessary elements are rendered with love and wit (though not brevity). Depp remains hysterical, have no fear, and Davy Jones's army of sea-ghouls is wonderfully realized: they're shambling accretions of kelp, shell, and fish parts. One, split open by the swing of a cutlass, spills a flood of kippers onto the heaving deck. Inspired moments like that would surely be tough to leave out. But pure entertainment must be cut without mercy, or it drags, and Dead Man's Chest drags. That's a shame. We are a few doubloons short of a treasure. — Peter Smith

Given the arresting sci-fi provenance of the other major filmmakers who've tackled the work of Philip K. Dick — a formidable list that includes Steven Spielberg (Minority Report), Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall), and Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) — it's a tad ironic that Richard Linklater, he of the low budgets and slapdash visual sense, has come the closest to approximating the author's singularly cynical-paranoid worldview. At the same time, that makes perfect sense: Linklater, whose abiding interest is the human animal, is the director least likely to be distracted by shiny techno-trinkets.
     Like virtually all of Dick's work, A Scanner Darkly is set in the near future and involves various mind-bending speculative ideas, which Linklater duly incorporates into his adaptation; the most striking example here is something called a "scramble suit," which disguises the wearer's identity by projecting a constantly shifting Cubist collage of alternate identities onto its surface. But the characters are all junkies (or undercover cops posing as junkies), addicted to a brain-shriveling drug known as Substance D. The film is often perfectly content to dawdle and even zone, observing their addled behavior and reveling in the uniquely convoluted cadences of their speech. It's almost a shame that Linklater had already used the title Dazed and Confused.
    Of course, what gives A Scanner Darkly its requisite sense of the surreal is the use of Bob Sabiston's pioneering form of computer-rotoscoped animation, which Linklater first employed in Waking Life. Thus the cast — Keanu Reeves, as identity-damaged narc Bob Arctor; Winona Ryder, persuasively burned-out as his dealer; and Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson, chewing the digital scenery as his perpetually stoned friends — shimmer and jitter across the screen, caught in an uneasy limbo between the mundane and the hallucinatory. While this is apropos thematically, it becomes somewhat monotonous from a strictly visual standpoint; a hundred minutes is a long time to forgo any sense of fine detail, which is more or less what Sabiston's technique accomplishes. (At least in Waking Life the style changed every few minutes.) And while Scanner the movie is remarkably faithful to Scanner the novel, the book's labyrinthine narrative doesn't quite survive the necessary compressions and abridgements. In the end, Scanner feels like what it is: a distant approximation of something else. But at least the emphasis is on tone rather than tech. — Mike D'Angelo