I loved this movie. I love pirates, I love Geoffrey Rush, I love the swashbuckling action and high-seas fantasy. It's become cool to hate the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise for reasons I cannot comprehend; it remains one of my favorite series of any media. Yet for all my enthusiasm and affection for this movie, Dead Men Tell No Tales is a bloated, waterlogged disappointment.
It's safe, in this instance, to squarely blame the script. We can only bitterly wonder what was in Jeff Nathanson's mind as he wrote this mess of a tale. The brilliance of Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal is nowhere to be found here. Instead we get a haphazard tale that takes intriguing ideas and enchanting mythology and butchers them into a collage of weirdness that is left unexplained and, worse, underappreciated. The basic premise of the film makes almost no sense as timelines are made arbitrary and characters don't age as they should. And, perhaps worst of all, the dialogue is laughably banal, using frequent and lazy sexual innuendo to offset the occasional expository hooey that feels like an elementary book's back-cover summary. Even casual interactions between characters reveal nothing beyond the comparable shallowness of each. One can only hope that Nathanson's upcoming work on The Lion King remake can see him return to some sort of form.
Have I lambasted it enough yet? Perhaps not, as I consider the direction under Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg. The relative unknowns have their moments of style and flair, notably in one scene when Jack Sparrow faces the guillotine leaves you feeling particularly elated. But their slipshod sense of characters, incoherent pacing, and bizarre tendency to randomly break into slow motion are bewildering more often than not. They want to tie in too many threads, keep the focus on too many people doing too many things, and answer questions that were never asked.
**SPOILER ALERT**
The film takes place almost twenty years after At World's End, making Henry Turner about 19 years old. Having searched his entire young life for a way to save his father from his cursed fate aboard the Flying Dutchman, he embarks on a quest to find the Trident of Poseidon, which can apparently control the sea and break marine curses. He teams up with young astronomer and scientist Carina, an orphaned girl wrongfully accused of witchcraft, before the two join Captain Jack Sparrow's escape from the law to the open ocean. Concurrent with all this, Captain Salazar and his ghostly crew of pirate-killers escape from the Bermuda Triangle hell-bent on finding and murdering Jack, the pirate who entrapped them there.
While trying to acclimate myself to this new adventure and its new faces, I found myself annoyed that there was no mention of Angelica the lovely pirate whom Jack left on a cay with a voodoo doll of himself. We still don't know what became of Syrena the mermaid or Philip the missionary. We do, thankfully, see a wealthy and powerful Barbossa as captain of the Queen Anne's Revenge and his restoration of the Black Pearl from Blackbeard's bottle. And, of course, we get a couple brief scenes featuring Will and Elizabeth Turner, though their presence is woefully short-lived.
With the exception of some spectacular ghost soldiers (essentially pirates, but not by name), an island of stars, and the show-stopping but sadly brief presence of predatory ghost sharks (GHOST. SHARKS.), the film has little in the way of novelty or awe. I'm glad something in this series finally mentioned the Bermuda Triangle, and it's pretty cool, but the mythology is underwritten and confused, linking it to Jack's compass in a nonsensical manner. Worse, and unforgivably in my opinion, the climax comes with the revelation that Carina the astronomer is actually Barbossa's long-lost daughter, not long before he dies to save everyone from Salazar. Why the film felt the need to kill off the best character and actor in the franchise is far beyond me. While he's already been brought back from the dead once and presumably could again, the witch-goddess Tia Dalma is long out of the picture. This film tries to re-do her in the form of Shansa, another tattooed witch persecuted by a naval officer (in the form of David Wenham, no less), but she's in it so sparsely I wonder if she wasn't just a fever dream.
The film ends rather firmly, thank heaven, and even eked out a little tear from me in the last scene. But stick around after the credits: we see Will Turner, free of the Dutchman and sleeping with a radiant Keira Knightley in her second scene in the movie, having nightmares of his curse. The shadow of Davy Jones falls across his bed and we see a crab claw snap before he awakens, horrified. As he falls asleep again, safe in the arms of his love, the camera pans down to see wet barnacles on the ground, suggesting his nightmare wasn't only in his head. Should Disney dive in for another swashbuckling adventure, could they resurrect Bill Nighy as the devilish fish-man? I certainly hope not, but the possibilities of Will's post-traumatic stress from the curse are at least intriguing.
This franchise, which could go on forever considering the endless ideas of mythic adventures in the Caribbean, will probably not see another installment. If it does, as I dearly pray it will, Disney desperately needs to double- and triple-check who it hires to write and direct. This bunch of flotsam and jetsam should have had to walk the plank.
IMDb: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
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