Pirates of the Caribbean; Salazar's Revenge. Zombie ... everything

 

That, right there, is the movie reviewing itself. The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has climbed so far up itself that sharks are jumping it. And not just any old sharks. Zombie sharks. That’s how far past its sell-by date POTC has got.
It’s hard to come up with anything to say which that picture doesn’t say better. One plus is that it’s the shortest POTC movie ever, though I guarantee you that it won’t feel like it, because it takes its own sweet time getting to what little point it’s got in play. There’s about a TV episode’s worth of plot beefed out with side quests and digressions and flashbacks. There is simultaneously - as always - way too much Jack Sparrow and not nearly enough of anything else. I’d always found Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner the most tedious part of the first three movies, but then they rolled out his son and suddenly Orlando Bloom seemed like the second coming of George Clooney. And Orlando Bloom actually shows up, so you can check the generations of the Turner family against each other.
Barbossa gets schwacked heroically saving the daughter he never knew he had, but POTC is worse than Fast and Furious when it comes to bringing people back from certain death (or better offers) so I assume that Barbossa will be back shortly. I hope he will, anyhow, since I’ve an unholy fondness for this. I admire a man who can say no to Keira Knightley. Who is also back in the last minute of the movie, classing up the joint something wicked as she can’t help doing.
Jack survives everything, as of course he does. And from time to time he even earns his pay; there’s a scene with a guillotine which is wonderfully imaginative and works partly because Depp’s schtick is at its best when Jack is being terrified and bewildered. Just in case we get confused about that, it’s immediately followed by a scene with a botched hanging and our two juvenile leads and it’s just awful.
As is so often the case when a movie has cost more than 250 million dollars, you can see where the money went, but not why anyone thought it should. There’s a huge opening setpiece in which the Sparrow gang steals an entire bank and drags it through a small town. On the one hand, this is impossible; on the other hand the idea of dragging a vault’s been done properly in this; and on the third, most important hand, this took ten minutes and cost just what you’d think it would cost to destroy a fake town and it doesn’t advance the plot by an inch.
One thing I will say for it; somehow, Javier Bardem doesn’t feel as outrageously wasted as Salazar as Ian McShane did as Blackbeard. Don’t get me wrong; it’s still a waste of his talent, but somehow it’s not as annoying. Possibly because I think that it’s always a shame when you have McShane on call and don’t just spend the whole movie letting him swear poetically at people he’s disappointed by. He’d have a lot to do in this movie.