MOVIE REVIEW – Johnny Depp is back as Jack Sparrow, the both funny and legendary pirate captain the Pirates of The Caribbean series. “Uncharted waters” could be the worse description of this latest outing as Dead Men Tell No Tales (Salazar’s Revenge in Europe) is an all-too-familiar pirate trip and also a tired and soulless fan service, lacking any original idea.

 

Of course, besides good old Johnny Depp, other supporting characters shows up as well. Brenton Thwaites stars as the son of Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), young Henry Turner. He meets up with a smart and pretty girl who’s mistaken for a witch: Miss Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario). After some legendary pirate stuff goes down, they quickly team up with Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) in search for Poseidon’s trident.

It’s the only item, which could help them defeat undead Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem) before he overtakes the seas completely – a mutual interest that’s shared with Captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush). Now include British pursuers, zombie sharks, and a real witch. Sounds like quite the pirate tale, isn’t it? Well, not really…

“Yarr, matey!”, or “yawn, matey!”?

While the other Pirates movies offered more than Depp’s drunken gallivanting, Dead Men Tell No Tales exists as a Jack Sparrow vessel. Brenton Thwaites doesn’t display at all the charisma of Orlando Bloom, Kaya Scodelario is forced to roll her eyes at stupid men, and Bardem’s ghost crew are also fairly uninspired villains – this is Depp’s show.

Theme-park rides are usually decent fun, but when you get back on and go around again, and it’s always the same ride. So perhaps it’s deliberate that Salazar’s Revenge (weirdly changed from the superior US title Dead Men Tell No Tales) feels like little more than a remake of the first-ever Pirates Of The Caribbean. Much like the previous three Pirates installments, in fact.

Let’s be fair: the Norwegian directing team Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (who proved their cinematic sea-legs with 2012’s Kon-Tiki), added some innovation to show in the earlier slapstick-swashbuckling (snap buckling?) set-pieces. One treats us to the sight of Jack trapped in a rotating guillotine, the centrifugal force pushing and pulling the spine-severing blade inches from his neck.

Another outdoes the Fast & Furious gag of cars dragging a bank safe by having a speeding horse-drawn carriage tow an entire bank. But later, as the scale and volume ramp up, sense-assaulting CGI floods the action and any visual elegance becomes lost at sea. Honestly, what’s wrong with just having a sword fight every now and again?

Romance? Make it “bore-mance”  instead…

Returning to the basic formula of the three Pirates films directed by Gore Verbinski, in which Johnny Depp’s shady and campy Jack Sparrow played second banana to an insipid love story, Dead Men Tell No Tales finds the alcoholic pirate trading away his magical compass—the one that leads anyone who holds it to what they need most—for a bottle of rum, thereby freeing a ghostly Spanish ship of the line from the Devil’s Triangle.

The mandatory tedious courtship comes courtesy of Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites), the son of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley’s characters from the earlier films, and an orphan named Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario). Both are very badly written and deprived of chemistry, but that’s how it has to be. All Pirates Of The Caribbean movies have their share of tedium and lard (Verbinski’s Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End was almost three hours long), but these are inseparable from the more irreverent and grotesque qualities that make these things fun.

That’s getting old, Johnny

Still, there’s only so much nonsensical plot lurches and inconsistencies one can take before it’s getting exhausting. And even the once-reliable Johnny can’t distract us like he used to. Jack’s schtick has consumed the character. Where once he was an engaging oddity whose unhinged mannerisms you felt cloaked hidden (and sober) depths, Jack now feels like a routine rather than a person. Where his soul once dwelled, we find the only backstory — executed with some horribly uncanny valley de-aging CGI work on Depp’s face and one supremely pointless revelation.

Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg bulk up running times, homogenize visuals and whirl a typhoon of fan-servicing, all in the name of Disney swashbuckling. “Familiar” doesn’t begin to describe Sparrow’s latest quest, as there’s something so amiss this time around.

In the end what we have here is a tired Johnny Depp, playing a tired character in a tired formula, which is just overdone. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, besides the fact that it completely lacks any element (plot, character, anything) which would make it at least a bit original or interesting. It’s nothing more, than the old, squeaky theme ride attraction you tried too many times, and which doesn’t hold any more fun, as much is tries too hard to impress you.

-BadSector-