Like the old ones, but even better

Rating: 10/10 (24 September 2017)

I'll admit, I walked into the theater half-expecting this to be the dying gasps from this long-running franchise. But instead I found myself hugely entertained by this fun spectacular adventure. This is an enjoyable movie.
I'd even say this installment just may be my favorite one of the franchise yet and here's why. The positives of this franchise, the huge spectacle, silly humor, and grand sense of adventure, also tended to be bogged down by its convoluted & confusing plots & mythology.
But by now that we've reached this movie, it feels like they've smoothed out all the old defects in the formula, so to speak, and the result is a streamlined pirates movie, retaining all the elements that worked in the old ones, while simplifying some of the excessive plot details that tended to bog down the old ones. So while this movie doesn't necessarily feel like something new, it does feels like we're getting the same formula from all the way back to the first movie but improved.
And I actually quite like that Jack Sparrow is a character who hasn't evolved one bit throughout this 14 year franchise. He's the exact same buffoon from the first movie. It's like he hasn't learned a single thing or changed at all in any of these movies. This may be the most brilliant thing about this franchise. That's why we can have this movie, so many years after the first one and still feel so much like nothing's changed, because the story really hasn't even tried to have him change as a person. And that's a good thing, because we can like his character as he has always been.