Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017)

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.

Skyfall (2012)

Director: Sam Mendes

Cast: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes

Have I Seen It Before?: It’s actually the only Bond film that I managed to talk my wife into seeing in the theater. I can report that she thought it was “okay.”

Did I like it?: As I continued to read through Nobody Does It Better: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of James Bond, I was mystified that somehow this film has reduced in estimation by the viewing community at large.

Is it quite as good as Casino Royale (2006)? That’s one of those classic comparisons that is in equal measures resoundingly unfair and completely unavoidable. Royale is the first legitimate interpretation of a Fleming novel since probably Goldfinger (1964) but really, truly From Russia With Love (1963). This movie doesn’t bother to do what every other Bond film does and try to synthesize the most time-worn wisps of a story around the barest elements of the Fleming canon. This one somehow re-examines the modern Bond and the literary Bond and manages to create something that Fleming would have been proud of. Or at least, something Fleming would have gotten embroiled into a decades long copyright that would make many of the subsequent films worse for the effort. Some might complain that we jumped from Bond’s earliest missions to the period in time when he desperately wants to hang up his Walther forever, but if I understand the realities of the 00-unit in the Fleming books, the limited shelf life fits.

Notice how I didn’t really answer the question? I don’t want to pick between these two. They’re the best (so far) in a run for Craig where the weak links in the chain would be the best film another Bond could ever hope to do.

So, let’s dwell on what the film does astonishingly well. The theme song from Adele is the greatest Bond opener since at least the brief experiment with New Wave during the bridge between Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton, and really, truly since Shirley Bassey last graced us with her presence in Moonraker (1979). I mean, it may be my favorite Bond theme ever, and that is some rarified company.

And then there is that ending. No, not the extended sequence borrowing heavily from Home Alone (1990) that some people seem bent out of shape about, although I have a feeling people would be more bothered by it if the original long-shot plan of having Sean Connery play the groundskeeper, Kincade (Albert Finney)*. I speak more of that final sequence where Craig abandons the prequel elements of his films up until that point and goes through the gauntlet of M’s (Ralph Fiennes) leather door to be finally a fully-formed Bond.

“Are you ready to get back to work?”

“With pleasure.”

Sure beats the hell out of “I thought Christmas only comes once a year” as far as last lines in Bond films is concerned.

Now if only that next film had capitalized on the promise laid here a little better. That would’ve been great.

*The notion that Connery would somehow skip out on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) but instead come out of retirement for an EON production is mystifying beyond my previous capacity for understanding. By all accounts—and the oral history mentioned above makes no reference to the notion—the Broccoli’s abandoned the notion before even approaching Connery. But what if they had gone completely crazy on the idea. They could have absolutely unified the continuity of the entire series if they slapped Pierce Brosnan in the Javier Bardem role? Yes, the movie would be an astonishing mess, and most of the 90s Bond movies would somehow mean even less, but we’d probably still be talking about it.