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Well, this one is at least better than the prior entry in this never-ending franchise that has grown stale and cemented into a series of character tropes and ideas recycled from one chapter to the next. There’s nothing new added to the expanded mythology here besides the presence of young, dewy lovers who are obviously intended to take over the franchise once Johnny Depp is ready to let Jack Sparrow rest, and even then, they play out as lukewarm versions of the characters played by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. Any franchise has a natural lifespan, and Disney’s refusal to let this one go makes the freewheeling, anarchic, bloated fun of Gore Verbinski’s three films look worse as more chapters dilute their luster.
Dead Men Tell No Tales borrows its title from one of the few pieces of ephemera in the ride that the prior films hadn’t already consumed and regurgitated back up on the screen. Part of me waited for the talking skull to drop the line before a shocking action or explosive action scene kicked in, but there was no such luck. Instead, we’re treated to another entry where a villain is stuck to live a supernatural life stuck out at sea. The franchise seems to view the seas as both the nurturing mother, the charismatic devil, and a perpetual state of limbo depending on where they fall on the protagonist, antagonist spectrum.
Here we follow Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites, just as bland and dreamy as Bloom) as he tries to break the curse left upon his father at the end of At World’s End. Concurrently we also follow Carina Smith (Kaya Scodelario), a young woman doomed to be killed for the crimes for witchcraft because she can perform complex mathematics as she tries to unravel the mystery of the map that no man can read. Naturally, their ambitions dovetail as they seek the same object: the trident of Poseidon, an object with the ability to break any of the sea’s many curses. Jack Sparrow gets drawn in, Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush is still in glorious ham mode) replays his fremeny antics, and our villain is a ghoul stuck at sea with a past that ties directly with Sparrow’s.
If any of this sounds routine and familiar in this franchise, then good, that means you’re paying attention. Dead Men Tell No Tales is simply a Frankenstein-like super-entry in the franchise that takes pieces from the prior four films and shoves them all together. Occasionally it manages to liven things up, a zombie shark attack is bit of spark and fun that much of the surrounding film is missing and Javier Bardem playing to rafters of the neighboring theater, but it mainly feels like you’ve seen all of this before and done better. It’s the sight of a franchise doing a soft reboot on itself after fourteen years.
And it still repeats the major problem of On Stranger Tides by mistaking Sparrow as a leading character when he works best as a loopy, chaotic supporting player. It was shocking to revisit The Curse of the Black Pearl and be reminded of how shocking and daring his original performance was in lieu of what has happened since. It’s now a predictable series of tics strung together in a perfunctory manner that suggests the sight of Marlon Brando slumming it in dreck like The Island of Dr. Moreau. It doesn’t help that Thwaites can’t manage the straight-man demeanor to Depp that Bloom actually did well with, and that whole scenario merely becomes something of another cog in a noisy machine.
Somehow, Dead Men Tell No Tales is the shortest of the four films at just a little over two hours, yet it still manages to feel as stretched out as At World’s End, the longest entry in the series. A good chance that the film’s inability to surprise us like the first three could with their completely bonkers set pieces and mythology could. Now this franchise feels like one of the rides at the Disney theme parks – rigidly locked into place and stiffly moving through the same motions over and over again. Except it’s not as fun as any of those rides.
They’ve already announced plans for a sixth film. Please, for the love of god, send this franchise to the locker already. Send it out to sea, return it to the murky bilge, insert whatever sea-related pun you’d like Disney, just give this franchise a rest already.
