Not the comeback it could have been.

Rating: 4/10 (16 June 2017)

After the monstrous atrocity that was Pirates 4, Disney decides to laugh it off and give us another Pirates movie. Unfortunately, the only real compliment I can give this film is the fact that it tried to ignore the fourth movie ever happened as best as it could. I can tell they tried...to some degree. But it falls short of the fun and adventure of the first film (and dare I say the second or third.)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is a film in which dead men do indeed tell tales. Tales of a young CGI Jack Sparrow outsmarting a Spanish naval officer and causing his ship to blow up somehow. Jack Sparrow is back, this time in the role he is supposed to be in these films: NOT the main character and NOT a hero (one of the great faults of the last film). This time the story follows Will and Elizabeth Turner's son Henry and a spunky (and annoyingly arrogant) young woman who is smart and knows everything. They join Jack and his small crew to look for the trident of Poseidon.
But evil undead Javier Bardem wants revenge on Jack for leading him to his death all those years ago, so he chases after them with a monster ship that bites other ships and zombie sharks. These two things sound a lot cooler than they really are. Oh, and little Henry Turner wants the trident to cure his daddy of Davy Jones Syndrome and there's something about the girl's father.
I think the main problem I had with the film was the action. The strongest aspects of the Pirates movies are the action scenes, but boy did they screw it up here. Every single scene is either way too dark to see anything, or far too bright to see anything. There's never a comfortable in-between. There were several instances in the film where I was squinting at the darkness, trying to piece together the scene in my mind, only for a shaft of light to break out and fry my retinas. The camera is so shaky and the editing is so choppy and abrupt that it's impossible to process all the cool pirate action the movie promised.
The story is boring and the characters are uninteresting. They tried to give us a replacement for Will and Elizabeth (not ultra interesting, either, but at least they were somewhat likable) with their son (who is as boring as a brick wall) and a new character, some chick who people think is a witch because she's really good with astronomy and smart people stuff. She was incredibly irritating, constantly bragging about how much smarter she was than those BIG DUMB MEN she was around. It was clear they were trying REALLY hard to make her a strong character, but it was so blatant that it became irritating.
The whole movie just felt like it was going through the motions: like it had a basic checklist of things that were in the previous movies that people liked and trying to shove it all in there. These things include:
-Jack Sparrow is a ladies man
-Jack Sparrow is funny and drunk
-Undead pirate man who hates Jack and wants to kill him
-Captain Barbossa
-Will and Elizabeth types that serve as a contrast to Jack and his behavior
-a mystical object the characters race to find before the bad guys
-sea battles
-monsters (i.e. zombie sharks)
-mean and pompous British dudes
-Jack Sparrow is a funny guy, isn't he?
-elaborate escape sequences
-crazy supernatural phenomenon related to the sea
-explosions
-swords
-slapstick humor (involving Jack Sparrow)
In listing all these attributes, it becomes clear that the filmmakers were trying WAY too hard. They were clearly desperate to recapture the lighthearted fun of the previous movies, but all they've accomplished is making one big mess of a movie. The movie is shot poorly, the humor feels tired and lazy, and the characters range from bland to irritating. Even the return of our beloved Jack Sparrow feels a bit underwhelming.
I think the whole point I'm trying to make is that this movie doesn't have much of a reason to exist. They should have stopped making Pirates movies a long time ago, but after the stupendous screw up that was On Stranger Tides, I guess Disney wanted to prove they could make a fun Pirate adventure again that didn't suck.
For all its faults, I can still say it's better than On Stranger Tides, but it's still so far beneath the enjoy-ability of the first two or three movies that I can't even recommend seeing it just for the sake of seeing another Pirates movie. It just didn't leave much of an emotional impact, and I can't say that watching it was even that fun. It's not the worst movie ever made, and it's not the worst Pirates movie ever made. But it's so bland and poorly shot that I don't think it's worth seeing. Yes, Jack is back, but who really cares anymore? We don't need any more Pirates movies.