Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

It was around the early 2000s that the Disney Studio started toying with the idea of making films off of their theme park attractions.  This idea was kicked off in 2002 with the quickly forgotten The Country Bears.  The notion probably would have died right then and there had it not been for the fact that one year later, there was Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.  With a lot of thrilling adventure and special effects, combined with an off-kilter performance by Johnny Depp that finally made him a bankable film star, the movie kicked off one of the biggest live action blockbuster franchises in the studio's history.

It's 14 years later, and as Dead Men Tell No Tales (the fifth Pirates movie) hits the screen, I can't shake the sense that it's time to move on.  I'm Pirated out, to be quite honest.  Yes, the battles and set pieces are as big and as elaborate as ever, there are some clever special effects (Zombie Sharks!), and Depp is as likable as ever as the frequently drunk and one-liner spewing Captain Jack Sparrow.  But the franchise has simply not evolved over time.  Instead, they have only increased the volume and included bigger and more ridiculous action scenes.  This entry kicks off with Jack and his men stealing a bank.  Not robbing a bank, mind you, but literally stealing the entire building itself, and dragging it down the street as it collides into homes and screaming extras.  I was actually smiling as this scene kicked off, as I was excited to see how it was going to work out.  That, and Depp gets off a couple funny lines before the chaos starts.  But then, yes, the chaos starts, and it kind of drones on until we're anxious for the scene to be done with.

After this rousing excuse of overkill, the movie sputters as it introduces our new characters in this entry.  Early on, it kind of seems to be jumping about various films to the point that I was starting to wonder when they would connect.  First we have our new villain - the ghostly Captain Salazar (Javier Bardam) and his skeletal crew, who are cursed and vow vengeance against the man who made them dead in the first place.  No prizes for guessing it's Jack Sparrow.  Then we have our bland young co-stars who assist Jack in this adventure, but never quite bring any personality or anything fresh to this adventure.  They are Henry (Brenton Thwaites), the adult son of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann from the first three films, and Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario), an astronomer who is accused of being a witch due to her intelligence.  They team up with Jack to find Poseidon's trident, which can break any curse of the sea.  Oh, and Geoffrey Rush is back as Barbossa, and brings some fun and life to the proceedings.

The movie fills every corner of the screen with sword-wielding extras, cannons firing, living carvings, ghastly ghouls, skeletal birds, and those previously mentioned Zombie Sharks, which given the current status both zombies and sharks have in pop culture, I'm surprised waited this long until they appeared in this particular franchise.  And while I admired the technical skill used to bring them to life, I was never as thrilled as I should be.  Salazar and his ghost crew are fun and creepy looking, but they pale in comparison to the pirates in the first movie who turned into skeletons when they stepped in the moonlight.  And then there are the elaborate set pieces, such as the one where Jack narrowly misses a guillotine blade over and over, and even one where the sea itself splits in half.  This is impressive stuff on a technical level, and I applaud the artists who put this stuff together.  But none of it connects emotionally.

That's because Pirates is all overkill all the time.  Even in a movie that is supposed to be grand and over the top such as this needs to give the audience a chance to catch their breath.  As it starts to lay one spectacular event on top of another, the audience starts to grow restless.  We're essentially watching a tech demo that runs just over two hours.  Yes, the directing team of Joachim Renning and Espen Sandberg have successfully pulled off every spectacular feat that the script threw at them, and they should be commended.  But there's never a reason for us to be watching another one of these movies.  I would be much more impressed if I was watching these kind of images and battles in a story or with characters that actually evolved, or did more than spew one-liners and exposition about lost treasure and ancient curses.  This feels like a movie where they filmmakers knew they didn't have that great of a script, so they threw as much money into it as possible to cover it up.

If you haven't had your fill of this series yet, you'll probably enjoy it.  Heck, it's probably the best Pirates movie we've gotten in a while, and while it's still bloated, it's at least shorter than most of the other films have been.  But it still feels like we've sailed this course many times before.

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