Director: Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg
Cast: Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Brenton Thwaites, Geoffrey Rush
Have I Seen it Before: Maybe, probably? I have a vague inkling that I saw Bardem’s character before, but I may have just seen an ad at some point during the initial film’s release.
Did I Like It: I’m more than a little stuck trying to come up with at least 300 words more to say about this series. The <first film> surprised everyone. It did this largely by being made despite the studios seemingly better judgment and actually making a simple action movie that was mostly about a lunatic pirate who was willing to do absolutely anything to get his ship back.
Three more movies ensued, and the Mouse House—as they can occasionally do—gave us more of what they thought worked. More byzantine plots, more water-logged monsters, and more and more special effects.
This film shaped up to be something of a course correction from the previous sequels, with Jack Sparrow (Depp) back in the position of an underdog pirate captain with no ship to captain. That gets us through half an hour, during which we have a fairly fun action set piece involving Sparrow and his crew largely failing at a bank robbery. Then we are lost in a sea (pun not intended, but I accept the responsibility for it) of cascading plot developments, to the point where the boredom of the previous sequels are back with a vengeance.
We’re now nearly ten years since this film, and the entire time we’ve been living under the threat of one more entry. Could you even bear to look at Sparrow in his 60s* trying to swagger his way through a laundry list of “We need to go get the item from the place!” lines?
Yeah, me neither.
*No worries there, Disney is plenty willing to de-age him, as evidenced here.