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.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)

Director: Rob Marshall

Cast: Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Ian McShane, Geoffrey Rush

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I’m almost sure I did. I have a fairly distinct memory of watching Depp escape from London. Lora and I talked about it, and although the memory is dim, we were together and almost had to have gone and seen it.

Did I Like It: Remember when I said, in my review of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) that, at the very least, I could always attach myself to the fact that Geoffrey Rush always seem to enjoy being in these movies.

So much for that. Barbosa gets his moments as the film ramps up to its conclusions where he can shed off the inexplicable obedience to the crown, where glimmers of fun start to come back up again—it’s as close as any character gets to having a character arc—but they are diminished indeed.

Beyond that, the franchise feels supremely out of gas. Whatever chaos made him so watchable in Curse of the Black Pearl has become so predictable that it spent most of the last decade seeping into every character he plays other than Sparrow. The brilliant scenes of ships at sea are restricted to the barest of minimums. The story is bereft of any sort of forward momentum, leaving us with a relatively short runtime, but I can’t get the sense at any point that we’re being treated to anything other than a handful of long pre-determined action set pieces lightly glued together with some padded runtime.

I might close the book on the series—and maybe films based on theme park rides at large—by saying that this might be a textbook case of a film being created simply because it has been a while since we’ve been subjected to an entry…

But then there’s always the ominous clouds of a fifth movie, and the ever-present threat of a theoretical sixth, spinoffs, and beyond.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård

Have I Seen It Before: I remember it ending. I remember Keith Richards. I had to have been here.

Did I Like It: It’s the same plot-gorged drudgery that weighs down a lot of trilogy closers. So many people are switching sides, seemingly at the drop of a hat, that the screenwriters are seriously over-estimating our desire to keep up with these matters. That might be enough to treat simply as white noise, but the real let-down here is the complete surrender to CGI. Did any of us realize that the secret sauce of these movies up until this point was not Johnny Deep looking like a lunatic, but in fact that in a year beginning with the number 2 a major studio would have any interest in—or the negligence to—allowing a movie to shoot on the actual ocean. Those days are long since gone, even by the third movie. I mourn when I might actually watch the following films.

We’ve all spent some time re-evaluating Johnny Depp, and rightly so. He’s maybe/probably not guilty of everything he’s ever been accused of, but he does seem like a lot, and that he’s long since lost whatever spark made him unpredictable in these films, and legitimately great in stuff like Ed Wood (1994). You know who’s not talked about enough—especially since he was almost completely absent from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)—in these films? Geoffrey Rush. Even when things were far better than they had any right being—in the first Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), all the way through any future films with which we might be threatened by this series, he never looks like he is having anything less than fun. These movies might have always been a bit beneath him, but he will never, ever let us know. I admire that much at least.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) was such a surprise experience, one couldn’t help but be far more curious about the sequel. Far more curious than anyone was about the original when it first came out. Throw in the decision to produce this and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) together, a la Back to the Future - Part II (1989) and Back to the Future - Part III (1990), I was certainly sold.

Did I Like It: Even at the time, I couldn’t help but be disappointed. There was just something missing, and it is only at this viewing that I am making any kind of effort to decide why. The simplest explanation is that, while most of the creative team is back, Hans Zimmer has replaced Klaus Badelt as composer. Zimmer is one of the all-time great film composers, but there was a special magic to Badelt’s score that only re-appears here as quotes of Badelt’s motif. It is a mercenary job, and a great example of just how important a film’s score can be to its total success.

But I think the problems will go deeper than that, and it goes back to that quality of anticipation. Not only was I anticipating another entry in the series, the directors and shareholders of the Walt Disney Company were, too. Verbinski and company could no longer fly under the radar, and so we’re left with a film that—like so many other sequels both before and after it—that echo moments that tested well from the original. It’s less a movie one might ever be surprised for, and more of a cinematic interpretation of a marketing report. Had Dead Man’s Chest been the first film, we might have been mildly entertained, but we would have been a very far distance from saying that a film based on a theme park ride has any right to be this good.