Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales Review - 5 Ups & 5 Downs
Well, it's an improvement.
Some six years after the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, On Stranger Tides, scored a cool billion dollars at the box office, the inevitable fifth installment is finally almost here, as Disney endeavours to see if there's still life in the swashbuckling adventure franchise given a general audience cooling on Johnny Depp in recent years.
On its own merits, though, how does number five fare? Neither particularly good nor especially bad, Dead Men Tell No Tales is an acceptably middle-of-the-road entry into the series, surpassing its more recent low-point but also failing to recapture the giddy fun of earlier efforts.
Box office success is likely and, honestly, critical consensus doesn't much matter as these movies have proven themselves to be thoroughly critic-proof many times over. For big fans of the series, it's a worthwhile dose of sea-faring fun, though mileage will vary among those who lost interest a few movies ago.
Downs...
5. The Humour Is Incredibly Hit-And-Miss
The Pirates movies have always mined a ton of fun out of their playful sense of humour, largely spewed forth by Johnny Depp's much-loved drunkard pirate Jack Sparrow, and though Depp mostly makes good on audience expectations (because he could play Sparrow in his sleep at this point), he's left sorely in need of a punchier, wittier script to work from.
Most of the film's humour comes from wordplay and innuendo, and while it was crisp and smart in the series' earlier entries, it's become increasingly more played-out and predictable with each passing movie.
That's not to say that Depp doesn't wring a few laughs out of his predicament, but the script too often takes the easy joke rather than something more thoughtful and clever, and so you'll probably predict the punchline to most of Sparrow's one-liners before he's even said them.
Yes, it's easy viewing and fine for a few chuckles, but considering the six-year wait, fans may be hoping for a script that doesn't feel quite so lazy.