Review: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES
(ACTION-ADVENTURE/FANTASY)
★★
Directed by Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg
Starring: Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Geoffrey Rush, Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Kevin McNally, Golshifteh Farahani, David Wenham, Stephen Graham, Angus Barnett, Martin Klebba, Adam Brown, Giles New, Orlando Bloom
Rated PG-13 for sequences of adventure violence, and some suggestive content.
129 minutes
Verdict:  It's not the worst thing I've seen, but it's not what I came for.  At least it made for a couple of really good trailers.  I should have just kept looking forward to it forever, but never watched it.  I miss Gore Verbinski.
YOU MAY ENJOY PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES IF YOU LIKED:
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES  (2011)
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL  (2003)
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN'S CHEST  (2006)
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END  (2007)
KON TIKI  (2012)

I've been looking forward to this movie very hard.  Like crazy hard.  The last time I was even close to this excited for a movie was probably AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON two years ago, and I wasn't even this excited then.  I love the Pirates of the Caribbean series.  The first installment was released in July 2003, nearly 14 years ago now, and in spite of the many naysayers who ridiculed it for being based on a theme park attraction, it was acclaimed by a majority of critics, nominated for five Academy Awards (a very substantial number for a summer action movie) and grossed over $650 million worldwide.  Nowadays, it's practically taken for granted that PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, is one of the great, fun summer blockbusters, but try making a sequel to it, and it always seems like its back to the hating.  The box office numbers have gotten bigger, with two of the sequels joining the billion dollar club, and the other coming close in the $900 millions, but the online film review aggregators have reported increasingly negative responses with each installment.  If you've been reading my lengthy and suitably bloated pieces on the first 4 films leading up to the release of this fifth, then you know that the third movie, AT WORLD'S END, is far and away my favorite, despite apparently having been sharply divisive among critics and audiences for its many plotlines and characters, as well as its lengthy running time.  It is long, but it's also so, so wonderful.  It's a wacky and operatic western spectacle on the high seas bursting with humor and pathos, and it was a fitting conclusion to the trilogy of POTC films directed by Gore Verbinski.  Disney knows full well though that you don't just throw away a cash cow, and frankly, while I'm happy to put Verbinski's trilogy on its own shelf, I also have nothing against having another shelf to continue the series if only for the sake of further piratey adventures within a blockbuster landscape overwhelmed with comic book superheroes and urban mayhem.  Unfortunately, Rob Marshall's entry to the POTC canon, ON STRANGER TIDES, was not a small drop in quality from the Verbinski trilogy, but it did have mermaids and hey, I don't hate it.  But I really, really want something more, something more in line with the thrills and chills that the series was still delivering even after critics had turned on it.  Six long years since the last installment, now comes DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, a movie that shot way back in the first half of 2015 and was accompanied with stories of star Johnny Depp's erratic behavior causing legal troubles, delays and rising costs.  I was a little scared to let myself like it, you know?  But then the previews started coming, and I liked them.  What really allowed me to let myself jump headlong into anticipatory hype, however, was when the movie screened for critics back in March 2017 at Cinema-Con in Las Vegas, and guess what?  They liked it!  So if the same stuffy critics who had so much over which to deride POTC movies that I'd loved anyway, a POTC movie that they liked might be even better, right?  That's about as good a signal as I'm going to get, so I embraced the joy of anticipating a movie with unhinged fervor.  But then, at the beginning of this week, the reviews start to pour in en masse, and you try to ignore the trends until you've seen and judged for yourself, but you can't miss that the feelings are generally negative.  So why did they like it so much back in March?  I don't know, so I just suck it up, watch it myself, and hope for the best.  But then, do you remember the part in THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL when Norrington and Governor Swann are examining a map with plans to rescue the recently kidnapped Elizabeth Swann, and Will Turner yells at them, "That's not good enough!" as he throws down a hatchet into the map?  That's kind of how I feel.  I work at a movie theater now, and I decorated the lobby with jute ropes and skulls and POTC posters, because these kinds of movies don't come around often enough, and now, I want to throw a hatchet into DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES and tell them that "That's not good enough!", but you know, in Orlando Bloom's husky tones.  At this point, I'm not sure where the Pirates franchise should go.  I'd be sad to see it fade away, but it's kind of sad to see what it is now.  Can it possibly exist without Jack Sparrow?  Gore Verbinski's had a couple of oversized flops in a row- maybe he could retreat back to the franchise and breathe some new life into it.  Ooh- or how about the team that put together the trailers for this one?  Because, it had pretty good trailers.  I really want more Pirates movies, but not like this, please.

As the first in the series without a screenplay from Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (although Rossio receives a 'story by' co-credit), PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES is written by Jeff Nathanson, a screenwriter whose credits range from the acclaimed Spielberg-directed comedy-crime-drama CATCH ME IF YOU CAN to the much-derided SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL, and Brett Ratner's TOWER HEIST is somewhere in the middle of those, I guess.  The story is set five years after ON STRANGER TIDES, and the characters have made some large and odd changes since then.  Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) still has a disgusting wig of curls for some reason, but he now sails the Queen Anne's Revenge as his flagship with many other ships at his beck and call, ruling the Caribbean, and Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, of course), in contrast, can't seem to catch a break.  At the end of his rope, Jack makes a desperate decision to trade his famous compass for a bottle of rum, which by some not entirely clear bit of magic releases a crew of ghostly pirate hunters led by the ruthless Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem) from the grave which Sparrow sent them to in his youth (shown in flashback with a weirdly CG-altered, dubbed Anthony De La Torre as the young Jack Sparrow).  Having learned the lesson from ON STRANGER TIDES that Jack Sparrow doesn't work as a lead character (as differentiated from a main character, which he is, but you need 'straight-man' characters to take the lead and let him bounce off of), we now have young Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites, who previously played Prince Philip in Disney's 2014 Memorial Day weekend release, MALEFICENT), the son of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, who's spent his young life studying the myths and legends of the sea in hopes of freeing his father from his curse as captain of the Flying Dutchman and has settled upon the "Trident of Poseidon", which can break all curses at sea.  Henry tracks down his father's old, um... 'frenemy', Jack, to recruit his help in finding the lost Trident, and along the way teams up with Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario, of the Maze Runner series), an academically-inclined young woman whose astronomical studies which she hopes will unlock the secret of her heritage have also caused her to be charged as a witch.  With Salazar's ghostly crew in pursuit on the seas, Henry and Carina team up with unlucky Jack to find the Trident, break Will Turner's curse, uncover the secret of Carina's parents, and send the dead back to their graves.

I only just recently saw KON-TIKI, the movie that apparently got Rønning & Sandberg the job of directing a new mega-budget POTC installment (they'd also previously made BANDIDAS in 2006, which I remember coming out but never saw, and MAX MANUS: MAN OF WAR in 2008, which I'm not very familiar with), and although it's a low budget Norwegian production, it's a surprisingly straightforward, efficient and inoffensive adventure story that might just as well have come out of Hollywood.  They didn't appear to have a strong voice one way or another; just steady direction, which could be ideal for getting a franchise back on track.  Without knowing too much about what their approach has been beyond that, it's hard to tell how much of what is them is coming through the movie, but this feels a lot like a European family fantasy movie.  The pirates are boyish stereotypes of pirates, more like grown men playing at pirates than the 'heightened reality' version of pirates from the Verbinski trilogy, sort of like the Michael Curtiz/Errol Flynn adventures like CAPTAIN BLOOD and THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, with a weirdly innocent sensibility that doesn't mesh with American action movies.  When interacting with Carina, it's reminiscent of the dwarfs' interactions with Snow White or the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion with Dorothy, as there's a goofy naivete about social niceties, common sense and women, which sounds funnier than it is and feels like it's from another series.  There's always something that feels off about the tone of the movie, and even while conceptually, the action set-pieces and story should work, it doesn't feel quite like a POTC movie.  Some cast members from the Verbinski trilogy who sat out ON STRANGER TIDES are back this time around, such as the bumbling duo of Murtogg and Mullroy (Giles New and Angus Barnett) who've gone from soldiers of the Royal Navy to members of Barbossa's pirate crew, and Martin Klebba returns as Sparrow's crewman Marty, but there's still a conspicuous absence of Pintel and Ragetti, Cotton, and a lot of the side character business goes to Scrum (Stephen Graham), returning from ON STRANGER TIDES.  It feels off-brand.  And then there's Jack.

Oh, Johnny Depp, will we ever get the magic back?  On paper, Jack Sparrow is back where he belongs, as a character who gets pulled into adventures and stumbles along but isn't pulling the way, but he's...well, he isn't quite Jack.  There's a bit of the goddamn Mad Hatter's nasally, lisping vocals butting their way in now, and a bit of Tonto here and there, and I'm just like, "Oh, God, please no..."  Elliot & Rossio's special brand of flowery word-twisting is sorely missed from Sparrow's voice, and somehow they managed to get all the very best stuff into the previews already ("You'd have seen a lot more if you'd kept yer cakehole shut!").  He has an introduction in this movie that was kind of funny and might have been very funny, if it weren't for that stupid effing Mad Hatter voice intruding.  He's meant to have lost his 'mojo' and become washed up at the start of this story, but he feels like the wrong kind of cartoony.  Jack Sparrow's always been pretty cartoony, with Pepe Le Pew and Bugs Bunny in his character DNA, but he's too goofy and incompetent here, lacking the dark edge and unexpected ability to land on his feet.  He's supposed to be down on his luck this time, so I guess that sort of makes sense, but from the beginning, a huge part of his appeal as a trickster hero is that he's always one step ahead of everyone else and crazy like a fox.  They got the memo that we don't want Jack as a leading man, but they missed that important detail, so, I don't know.  F*** everything, I guess.

Even Geoffrey Rush, who often has outshone in his enthusiasm for playing pirate and was a bright spot in the cast of ON STRANGER TIDES, just seems sad, and that makes me sad (sorry to make it about me again).  Javier Bardem is good though.  Bardem is where this movie should be, and where I so wish it could be (sorry for making about me again).  He's quirky and gruesome, oozing black bile and delivering his lines in a blend of heightened 18th century nobility and impulsivity. 

Most moviegoers won't care, but details involving how Jack got his compass are given in this movie that don't line up with background that was already established in previous movies, and the changes are not improvements.  They do the INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE thing where they go back and show one of young Jack Sparrow's early adventures (again, a little hazy within the established POTC canon, not that average moviegoers who don't care unreasonably about his series will care), and though the bombast of that action scene is actually pretty fun (there's also a solid "bank heist", so to speak, and the coral-riddled ocean floor setting of the climactic action is fairly inspired), the whole thing concludes by over-explaining certain aspects of Jack Sparrow's character to unsatisfactory degrees that, again, don't quite mesh with events already established in the series.  And as I say, casual moviegoers won't care how consistent it is with the previous installments (and if it were more successful in other areas, neither would I), but they might have a hard time understanding the movie as a whole without knowing what came before.  Probably most disappointing is the continuation of Will and Elizabeth's story, which was a magnificent and bittersweet Gothic soap opera with an awesome conclusion in AT WORLD'S END, and of course nothing DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES does can take that away, but if they couldn't do enough to make it worth it, it might well have been better to just leave it alone.  Maybe that could be said for the whole series, but then again, I still keep holding out hope for another great Pirates of the Caribbean movie, because when they're been good, there's simply nothing else like it.

                                                                                                                                                                         Images via Disney