Maybe the most befuddling thing about these Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels is why do they have to be so convoluted? Is there a golden plaque in Jerry Bruckheimer's office that decrees all Pirates Of The Caribbean follow-ups must have an overdose of characters and plotlines? Well, lemme try to recap real quickly the plot of this installment. Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) from the first three movies has a son, Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites). In order to break the spell that binds his father to the sea, Henry is on the look-out for a mystical object known as The Triton Of Poseidon. Someone else that's looking for this doo-hickey is astronomer Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario).
Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) gets involved in their search, as does an old enemy of his, Captain Armando Salazar (Javier Bardem), a now undead human being with a decades-old grudge against Jack who wants to also find the Triton so that he can garner untold power. Some of this is a little hazy since I'm not quite sure why Jack comes along for the journey (I guess he provides Henry and Carina with a ship?), while other characters returning from past movies like Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) feel superfluous to the entire plot while a British Royal Navy officer played by David Wenham that goes hunting for our heroes similarly feels extraneous.
Maybe I shouldn't be too surprised entire characters feel shoehorned into the story given how a large sum of this movie's script is filled out by nonsensical plot details that had me scratching my head at best. I could really just fill out this review with a spoilery checklist of nonsensical plot details from the movie (though I'll try to keep things more cohesive for this piece and not turn into CinemaSins). The climax especially gets pretty laughable in the barrage of supposedly important revelations and abilities the characters suddenly have simply for the sake of narrative convenience, namely Salazar's sudden ability to possess people (which feels like it could have come in handy way earlier on in the movie).
In terms of story structure, Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales just feels like a bunch of ideas stitched together regardless of if they actually worked cohesively together or not. In addition to Salazar's abrupt possession abilities in the climax, you also have stuff like CGI ghost sharks (which are at the center of a bizarrely incoherent slow-motion shot) that come and go in the movie without having any impact on the story or characters. These moments aren't even just fun to watch, which is also a big problem since this seafaring adventuring is direly lacking in excitement. Action scenes are kept to a shocking minimum with repetitive chase scenes making up the majority of the movies pathetic excuse for "fun".
All of this storytelling bloat is only the tip of the problems found in the screenplay (solely credited to Jeff Nathanson), which, among its many flaws, has an awful habit of shoving out the worst cringe-inducing dialogue. "We are both searching for our fathers. We're not so different you and I." is the kind of overly expository dialogue meant to signal a burgeoning romance between Henry and Carina. Really. That's what this movie counts as romantic dialogue. The examples of humorous dialogue found in the screenplay are similarly anemic with a lot of this supposedly witty dialogue being received by deafening silence in my jam-packed auditorium last night. Seagull droppings and an extended sequence whose sole joke is that Jack Sparrow is being forced to marry a woman whose "ugly" are the kind of cutting edge comedy you'll find here.
To be fair, maybe some of the jokes would work better if a good chunk of them they weren't being delivered by Johnny Depp in maybe one of his worst performances ever as an actor. When we first meet Jack Sparrow in this movie, he's sound asleep and Johnny Depp's performance doesn't get anymore lively or energetic from there. His line readings of already pretty terrible dialogue are stilted, his comedic timing's off, he has no good chemistry with anyone in the cast, it's really just a top-to-bottom awful performance that reminded me how far this characters fallen since that original movie when Jack Sparrow was so fun and so fresh and so witty and actually contributed to the plot. It also must be said that watching an intoxicated Johnny Depp wistfully leering about Kiera Knightley's breasts is even more tasteless than it would have beforehand given what we know about Johnny Depp being a wife-abuser. Watching a scene like that knowing how he treated Amber Heard is about as ill-times as if you were to drop a Mel Gibson movie where he drops a bunch of anti-Semitic dialogue in 2006. Even putting aside uncomfortable problems tied to Depp's reality, he's really just reaching Mortdecai-levels of awful here.
The new cast members fare no better, Brenton Thwaites especially coming off as generic as saltine crackers in his listless performance here while Kaya Scodelario's character starts off on the one interesting idea in the movie (a woman who does astronomy in this 19th century time period is considered a witch by the general populace) and then she just turns in a constant damsel-in-distress and forced romantic interest for Will Turner. Lovely. But she's not the only woman to get nothing to do in the movie! There's also Golshifteh Farahani (she was so great in Patterson!) in two throwaway scenes as an abruptly introduced seawitch. Poor Javier Bardem, who played amazing baddies in No Country For Old Men and Skyfall, gets nothing that's interesting to do here. He doesn't even get to at least chew the scenery or do some nasty bad guy stuff, it's such a waste. Really, the whole movie is a waste, a waste of your time and the talented directors (Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg helm this feature, though it really feels like anyone could have been directing this thing), a waste of energy for the projectors projecting the feature in movie theaters and a waste of the $230+ million spent making it. We could have helped the poor and cured diseases with that money. Instead, we spent it all on an excuse for a crappy movie that feels the need to explain where Jack Sparrow got his last name from (yes, really). Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is hot garbage with no fun or coherency to its name that only serves as an incredibly obvious sign that it's time for this franchise to pull into port and stay there.
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