I finally made it to a theater to see Johnny Depp as he reprises
his role of Captain Jack Sparrow for the 5th time in the most recent
installment of Disney's Pirates
of the Caribbean, Dead Men Tell No Tales. Saying it is perhaps the best of
the 4 sequels to the original Curse
of the Black Pearl, really
isn't saying much about whether the movie is good or not. It is better than the
others. In fact, I was thinking that if the odd numbered movies were edited and
had a few plot point continuity fixes and we pretended that movies 2 and 4
didn't exist, Pirates might be a decent trilogy. The
simple truth is that the original was an entertaining, fun, exciting,
lighthearted adventure. Movies 2 through 5 became dark tales of death and
drooling monsters while Jack Sparrow became steadily more foolish and drunk and
the rest of the pirates became dirtier and with poorer dental care. 
Dead Men Tell No Tales at least makes the attempt to rectify the
gruesome darkness of the other sequels, but it is still dark and the bad guys,
the ghost pirate killers, are pretty gruesome. The attempt comes with the
over-the-top antics of Sparrow and company, unfortunately Jack has become so
foolish and drunk it's like watching one long, bad joke. We do see a sparkle of
the Jack we came to love in the first movie at the end of this one, but for the
most part there is only so much staggering and suddenly dozing off that I found
funny. There are some good humorous lines in the movie, but they are pretty far
apart. What the movie does do is give us a good bad guy, grows the character of
Barbarossa, give us a pretty exciting end and moving last scene, and a fix to
that horrid ending to the original trilogy At
World's End. 
The plot, which is pretty thin,
consists of Jack Sparrow, who is out of luck, has become, if possible even more
drunk and irresponsible. We also meet Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites) the grown
son of Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley). You
may recall that in the third installment, Will Turner gave up his life and
family to replace Davy Jones. Many people, me included, really hated that
ending to what was supposed to be a romance adventure. Henry has sworn to his
father that he would break Davy Jones' curse and sets out to do so believing
that Jack can give him that answer. 
Jack has become cursed. He has
no luck, no ship, and barely any remaining crew. He drunkenly stumbles around
with the Black Pearl still stored in the bottle it was placed in by Black Beard
in the 4th movie. What the search for Jack does do, it leads Henry to Carina
Smyth (Kaya Scodelario) who has a clue that will give Henry a way to break the
curse. Jack is now being chased by the ghost pirate killer, Captain Salazar
(Javier Bardem) and his ghostly crew that Jack as a young and newly minted
pirate captain tricked into his destruction in to going into the Devil's
Triangle. 
One bright spot in the movie is
how vengeance driven Salazar is and how well Bardem works the character. Another bright spot is also the growth of Geoffrey Rush's character of Barbossa who has his own
secret twist from the days when 
All in all, despite its weak
plot and the caricature that Jack has become, Dead
Men Tell No Tales is an okay
movie with enough moments of humor and adventure and nice moments to carry it.
I don't feel like I wasted my money, and it is possibly the best of the
sequels. Still, don't go expecting to a sequel that has captured the sparkle of
the original movie. If I buy the DVD, I may wait for the price to drop before I
invest in it. 
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