Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Year: 2017
Genre: Action
Directed: Joachim Ronning, Espen Sandberg
Stars: Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Geoffrey Rush, Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Kevin McNally, Golshifteh Farahani, David Wenham, Stephen Graham, Angus Barnett, Martin Klebba, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley
Production: Walt Disney Pictures

Yet not once have they ever used the legend of Steve!

If you're like me, you were never much interested in the buccaneering, larger-than-life characters that populate the Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-Present) series. Subversive characterizations; forget about it, constantly shifting alliances; no need for it, organic integration of plot combined with clever setups and payoffs; pirate please! Everyone knows this series is and should always be a catalogue of increasingly farfetched pirate folklore almost entirely based on a small collection of supernatural trinkets Jack Sparrow (Depp) and Captain Barbossa (Rush) happen to have on them.

Submitted for your approval: Dead Men Tell No Tales answers the pressing questions of how Jack Sparrow got a hold of his magic compass. It's cursed (of course) - having the power to release the owner's worst fear the moment it is betrayed. Naturally, Jack betrays the compass at a bar, unleashing the ghostly Captain Salazar (Bardem) from his watery tomb. This then allows Salazar to seek revenge against the pirate who outsmarted him a generation ago. There's also some throwaway exposition involving two star-crossed lovers (Thwaites and Scodelario), and a mythical trident that gives the movie an excuse to dust off and use Orlando Bloom for all of five minutes.

Hey! Um, you're looking...good.

With a narrative foundation positively drenched in seafaring happenstance, Dead Men Tell No Tales is an uncompromising success of messy, soulless, conveyor-belt cinema. Its emotional stakes strain under the weight of Depp's, by now tired and embarrassing performance while the pacing ebbs and flows with the force of every exposition drop. The special-effects are a master's class in "quantity over substance" with a showstopping zombie shark sequence being a real standout in the patently unnecessary.

So what's the point of this then?

Speaking of the patently unnecessary - Captain Barbossa's inclusion blows any of the unnaturalness of the previous movies completely out of the water. His contrived, lazily detailed story serves as a perfect metaphor for series' parent company's indignant lack of creativity. But while some other franchises I could name, disguise familiar trappings with a false sense of reverence (cough cough Star Wars, cough cough) or at the very least retool them to seem new (cough cough Marvel), Pirates just lets its complex mythos dangle in front of Disney's nakedly plain ambitions to keep this moneymaker chugging.

Face it, you're going to watch this one...and the next...

It's almost like the movie is daring you to hate it. It brazenly has no economy of thought - letting its dry exposition scenes, its tired comedic scenes and its loud action scenes serve their simple purpose with nary an overlapping thread. It then perverts the original film's fondness for coincidence into an oppressive highlight reel of bad storytelling, bad editing and bad franchise maintenance. Then, as if to purposely piss everyone off, the movie manages to fit in a reoccurring joke about Scodelario's character being a witch because she happens to be smarter than everyone else in the f**king movie!

Gasps! So the legends are true!

This is now the fifth movie cataloging the adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow and his confederacy of loose fitting frienemies. Five movies...out of a franchise that arguably only made one good one! Can we please be done with these? Please? I don't think I can stomach another lucky brush with a well armed, supernatural villain on a search for vengeance and quite possibly Jack's tricorn hat. If anything this movie is proof that some things just need to die.

Final Grade: F