A Return to Form, But You Can Never Truly Go Home

Rating: 7/10 (25 May 2017)

It can be said that there hasn't been a truly good Pirates of the Caribbean film since the first one, The Curse of the Black Pearl.
Dead Men Tell No Tales is probably the next good Pirates film, but much like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it probably owes many of its good elements from the first film of its franchise.
Indeed, in this fifth adventure of Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, both current and a surprisingly effective de-aged version) we once again return to the well of an undead sea crew and a captain with a personal grudge against Sparrow (played by Javier Bardem, but not quite as menacingly as Geoffrey Rush's first time as Barbossa).
Much like the first film, Jack Sparrow is found rather down on his luck, and he must be rescued from the executioner by a Turner (this time the grown son of Orlando Bloom's William Turner) and seek a mystical artifact which will solve everyone's problems.
Let's set one thing in stone: this is definitely not the worst film in the Pirates franchise.
There are many great aspects of this film, mainly stemming from the fact that this is more or less an adventure film with not too much emphasis put on the made-up rules of the mystical elements of the story.
While Depp's Jack Sparrow is still the main man of the film, his role is significantly curtailed with the elements of Javier Bardem's Captain Salazar's motivations and the budding romance of Turner and Carina Smith, played by Kaya Scodelario.
The problems with this film, however, stems from the fact that these two elements take too much of the film away from Depp. He tends to fade into the background while we learn about Salazar's backstory, which has a few cool Easter eggs, but not much substance, and the romance with Turner and Carina feels very, very forced.
All told, even some well-placed innuendo isn't enough to take away from the fact that while this film is a return to form, almost as satisfying when the credits roll (don't forget the tantalizing post- credit sequence) as the first film, but 14 years later, the Curse of the Black Pearl is still king, and this film does not displace it.
Still, this film will definitely leave you with enough of a smile on your face to make the price of admission worth it.