A real dud

Rating: 3/10 (20 April 2019)

SALAZAR'S REVENGE is the fifth instalment in the seemingly endless PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN franchise, one of my least favourite in modern cinema. If you want to see something adult and serious involving pirates, I recommend the excellent TV series BLACK SAILS. Anyway, this one's another mindless CGI adventure in which the baton is passed to new, more youthful stars who are carbon copies of the Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley characters from the original trilogy. Depp is yet again on autopilot, genuine actors are constantly wasted (hello, Javier Bardem), and the whole thing is an excuse for CGI artists to offer endlessly vapid action scenes, one after another. Add in queasy humour, typically at the expense of the female characters, and you have a real dud.