Lower your expectations. It helps!

Rating: 6/10 (31 May 2017)

'We're all back together again!' Jerry Bruckheimer (Producer) tells the audience in a featurette. And it feels that the main purpose for this movie was some kind of reunion, because it was fun for them to make the first three.
Gore Verbinski is not directing this anymore. And it shows. There is nothing particular memorable about this movie in style or direction. They kept the DOP from the previous movies and the movie is still beautifully shot.
When I went to the cinema expecting nothing of the movie (because every story finished nicely at the end of the third movie) I was still entertained. Upon re-watching it, boredom struck. The movie's basic structure is like this: Here you have characters, they need to do these things, okay let's do these things, movie end. It's narratively speaking quite straight forward and therefore the movie doesn't feel pretentious or bloated. What does bother me is that the characters are so uninteresting and what happens during the movie is also quite uninteresting. The movie lost the grandeur of the previous entries.
Hey Jerry! What did you say? 'Blackbeard is one of the most evil characters we have ever given you?' Nah, sorry to burst your bubble but the only positive thing about the Blackbeard character is that he is played by Ian McShane. McShane does everything to make the character interesting, because the script is lacking. Blackbeard is really boring and underdeveloped. The second and third movies had time to develop their villains, whereas this movie did not take it's time or tried to bother. Probably because this movie was meant to be the Johnny Depp Show!
I'm not even going to mention the forced love-couple in this movie, because that was laughable. The Penelope Cruz character was a nice addition though and she was OK. Johnny himself was not that memorable. He was more on repeat of what he did in previous entries, but now he was the main focus of the movie.
But, overall, the highlights of the movie were the Mermaid scene and Geoffrey Rush's Barbossa. (he always looks like he's having fun with the character he plays) You can decide for yourself if that's worth your time to go see this movie.
Lower your expectations. It helps!