Review of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) by Captain_Chaos — 06 Jun 2017

I love pirate films, so seeing yet another Pirates of the Caribbean was a no-brainer. Dead Men marks the fifth entry in the series, already past the point at which any series that's lasted that long often begins to come apart at the seams, though that isn't the case here.

The franchise zombie was Stranger Tides- Dead Men is a better movie overall, injecting fresh blood in the form of new leading characters. Javier Bardem delights with his talent for portraying genuinely creepy villains, and the visual effects and orchestral score once again impress in a series known for such.

The series trademark mixture of swashbuckling and the supernatural is in full force here, though I think they could have done a lot more with Salazar and his ghost crew, especially when you compare them to Davy Jones and his sea-draugr.

The artifact of the day also gets very little screen time and, considering who it belongs to, a token appearance by its owner would have been pretty amazing. Geoffrey Rush once again portrays the conflicted and extra sea-salty Hector Barbossa, who finally gets his moment in the sun.

The weakest link in this film is actually Johnny Depp- I don't know if it's him or how they wrote Jack, but he might as well not have been in the film at all. He spends most of it in a drunken stupor and were it not for Salazar's single-minded vengeance against him, many of the characters might well have avoided hassle of the undead variety.