Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) is easily one of the best Hollywood blockbusters of the last twenty years. That film by director Gore Verbinski mixed a fun and sprawling plot with incredibly entertaining and surprisingly three-dimensional characters. It is an immensely re-watchable movie with its quick-witted dialogue and memorable action set pieces. It was a huge surprise back in 2003, and Disney didn’t know it at the time, but they had a gigantic blockbuster franchise on their hands. Even though the second and third installments, Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and At World’s End (2007), are polarizing films, I was, and remain, a huge fan of both. They continued the adventures of all the great characters from the first installment and each felt incredibly different in tone and style. Then there was the garbage fire fourth installment, On Stranger Tides (2011), which felt completely like a cash grab and uninspiring in almost every way.

That brings us to present day, where Disney has cranked out another Pirates of the Caribbean in the form of yet another garbage fire, Dead Men Tell No Tales. Despite no one really asking for a fifth installment, Disney could not turn away a franchise where On Stranger Tides made over $1 billion at the global box office. The hope was that maybe with a few years between installments, along with a new creative team and directors, they could return to the fun of the first installment. Unfortunately, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales gets lost at sea and the franchise itself should just sink to the bottom of the Hollywood ocean.

The film’s convoluted and unnecessarily complex plot features a past foe of Jack Sparrow’s, Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem), looking for the pirate after he tricked him and his crew leaving them cursed many years later. Jack is up to his normal shenanigans, which includes robbing a bank in a scene that is very reminiscent of Fast Five (this is one of the few fun scenes during the film’s overlong 129-minute runtime). Here he runs into Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites), who is looking for Jack to break the Flying Dutchman’s curse that is upon Will Turner (Orlando Bloom). There’s also Carina (Kaya Scodelario) who is accused of witchcraft, but is really a horologist (a joke that is far too overused) looking for Poseidon’s Trident based off a map given by the stars. Oh, and Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) is also back. To make an incredibly long story short, there are too many characters with their own subplots and goals set against a story that is equal parts ridiculous and dull. Yes, Pirates movies always feature complicated plots with numerous characters, but the earlier installments felt fresh and exciting, this go around just feels uninteresting and stale.

Speaking of stale, let’s talk about Johnny Depp. Returning for a fifth time to a character that not only put him back on the Hollywood map but earned him an Oscar nomination, Depp demonstrates almost no heart and is far removed from his first iteration of the character that it begs the question whether he was just showing up for a paycheck. To be fair, Captain Jack Sparrow seems to have been written by a five-year-old who has no memory of what the character was like in the first installment. In Curse of the Black Pearl, Jack is quite smart and uses his wit and charm to manipulate characters for personal gain. In Dead Men Tell No Tales, Jack is a drunk bumbling idiot who runs around knocking into everything and does not show any intelligence whatsoever. The character is regressing, and although it is easy to put most of the blame on Depp, that blame should be put on the writers instead.

Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.”

Overall, Dead Men Tell No Tales feels like Depp’s performance: dumb, annoying, and with only a few glimpses of what made the original work so well in the first place. There are a few exciting moments in the bloated CGI set pieces like the Fast Five-inspired sequence and a scene involving a guillotine that proves to be one of the film’s 3D highlights. A few moments of excitement, however, cannot make up for the crazily convoluted plot, abundance of characters and subplots, Johnny Depp’s phoned-in performance, and the sadness you’ll feel for what this franchise has become. What started out as a simple Disney World ride has now become one of the more annoying Hollywood franchises. Disney would be advised to sink the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and tell no more tales.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Scott Davis

Scott Davis is a recent graduate of Oakland University where he earned a degree in journalism. He worked for the student newspaper on campus, The Oakland Post, where he became the paper's managing editor. He also earned a minor in Cinema Studies at OU. Scott enjoys all things film and TV related, especially the blockbuster kind. He might be the biggest Christopher Nolan fan you know.

Latest posts by Scott Davis (see all)

• The Preview Reel: Incredibles 2 and Tag - June 13, 2018
• The Preview Reel: Action Point & Adrift - May 30, 2018
• The Preview Reel: Solo: A Star Wars Story - May 23, 2018