Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

I remember being mildly interested in Johnny Depp’s Keith Richards imitation in 2003, those halcyon days before Disney owned almost every conceivable intellectual property bearing the slightest franchise potential and was relegated to cannibalizing its own theme park rides for story ideas. The luster wore off more quickly for me than for many others, and everything after the second installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean series is just a blur of faux-English accents and forced celebrity cameos. So now, almost 15 years later, we come to movie No. 5 in what looks to be an inexhaustible exercise in diminishing returns. Why, you may ask? I honestly couldn’t tell you with any degree of certainty, but my money’s on money.

This being a Disney summer action spectacle, one could reasonably expect plenty of CG wizardry, and those expectations will be fulfilled — but make no mistake, this film is a visual catastrophe. (Apparently autocorrect thinks “cluster duck” is a phrase in common usage, if my hastily typed notes on the film’s stylistic acumen are any indication.) Yes, Javier Bardem’s missing cranium looks cool the first time you see it, but cool will only get you so far before directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg beat that particular dead horse so thoroughly that I wondered if I should call PETA.

The story, such as it is, picks up where 2011’s On Stranger Tides left off and proceeds to wind its way through narrative convolutions that are neither interesting nor coherent. Since we’re talking about a sequel to a 6-year-old film that I can’t remember ever finishing, the lack of comprehensibility in the plot may be my fault — but I sincerely doubt it. This time around we’ve got Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites) and Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario) chasing yet another marine MacGuffin, the trident of Poseidon. Turner wants the trident to free his dad (Orlando Bloom, reprising his role as Will Turner) from the curse of the Flying Dutchman, and Smyth wants it to… prove something about how she’s good at science by finding a mythical object? I don’t know, don’t ask me.

This, of course, is little more than a pretext to replace aging stars Bloom and Keira Knightley with younger counterparts, no doubt intended to drag the franchise on for another five films. But that’s essentially contingent on the continued presence of Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow — and based on Depp’s half-hearted performance, I suspect he’ll throw in the towel long before Disney. Maybe they can replace him with Michael Bolton and squeeze a couple more movies out of the cash cow before audiences are finally fed up.

Yes, there are a couple of interesting set pieces, and there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from Paul McCartney (who got his own damn poster for half a minute of screen time), but this is also a movie in which the franchise figuratively jumps the shark by having a zombie ghost shark literally jump Depp. The proceedings left me with little more than a resounding “so what?” followed by a more pressing follow-up question: If Poseidon’s knick-knacks can break oceanic curses, where’s the totem that can break the curse of having to review Pirates of the Caribbean movies? Rated PG-13 for sequences of adventure violence and some suggestive content. Now Playing at AMC River Hills Classic 10, Carolina Cinemark, Regal Biltmore Grande, Epic of Hendersonville.