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

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

IMDB Rating : 7.2/10 (as on 31.05.2017)

 Captain Jack Sparrow finds the winds of ill-fortune blowing even more strongly when deadly ghost pirates led by his old nemesis, the terrifying Captain Salazar, escape from the Devil's Triangle, determined to kill every pirate at sea...including him. Captain Jack's only hope of survival lies in seeking out the legendary Trident of Poseidon, a powerful artifact that bestows upon its possessor total control over the seas.

Directors: Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg

Writers: Jeff Nathanson (screenplay), Jeff Nathanson (story by)

Stars: Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Javier Bardem

IMDB link Here

Pirates of the Caribbean 5 Is a Sinking Vessel 

CHRISTOPHER ORR  

The subtitle of the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie is “Dead Men Tell No Tales.” The moral of the movie, alas, is that the same cannot be said of dead franchises.

The first Pirates film was an unexpected success: wildly overlong and over-plotted yet kept afloat by a wicked, bravura, and utterly original performance by Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, a swishily swaggering mélange of rum, eyeliner, and impudence. As is customary, the sequel was a pale imitation, and the third installment of the presumed trilogy went a bit trippy and meta.

Which would all have been well and good enough. But money makes people do silly things. The half-hearted and wildly unnecessary fourth movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was one such thing. It will surprise no one to learn that the latest installment in the franchise is another. At least On Stranger Tides had the decency to be a standalone movie; with Dead Men Tell No Tales, there is talk of that most pernicious of cinematic gambits, the “soft reboot.”

There’s a small role for Bloom, whose current career seems to consist largely of retconning characters (Legolas, Will Turner) from the period when some mistakenly thought he was a plausible leading man, into projects (The Hobbit, this latest Pirates entry) released at a point when we all know he’s not. There’s even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of Knightley, who clearly has better things to do than waste time in this franchise. In place of a previous cameo by Keith Richards, who was a principal inspiration for Jack Sparrow, we have a cameo by Paul McCartney, who was not.

As with the roles, so too with the plot. Per the norm, there is a mystic artifact to be acquired, the Trident of Poseidon, which has the power to break all of the sea-curses accumulated over the previous four films. (How’s that for a reboot?) There are plots and betrayals, piratical zombies and sea monsters and a ghost ship, and much bouncing around from vessel to vessel.

Even when the movie introduces new elements to the franchise, they are the stalest chestnuts in the cupboard. Jack Sparrow is given an entirely gratuitous origin story, so that he can be cinematically de-aged à la Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War or Kurt Russell in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. In fact, if you genuinely desire subplots about paternities revealed or a noble sacrifice by a secondary character in the final reel, go see (or re-see) Guardians 2, which does both better.

Depp slurs and sways his way through the film as usual, but reports of his erratic behavior on set cast the performance in a somewhat different light this time around. When, at one point, he introduces himself with boozy extravagance as “the great Captain Jack Sparrow,” his audience’s palpable disappointment feels as though it accrues as much to Depp himself as to the character he is playing. Meanwhile, newcomers Thwaites and Scodelario possess a small fraction of the shimmer supplied by Bloom and Knightley before them.

It all adds up to a dreary, dispiriting voyage. During the finale, as Bardem’s Salazar makes a final, mortal approach, he bellows, “This is where the tale ends!” Please, please, please, let it be so.

 Read full review at Atlantic

A Fitting Finale To Johnny Depp's Defining Franchise

Scott Mendelson

This has been pitched as "the final adventure," and no one is expecting a redux of the prior sequels' blowout box office. As such, the only thing at stake is Johnny Depp's star power, the money that Disney spent on this picture ($230 million plus marketing) and the viability of the Mouse House's Memorial Day launches

No, the world didn't need a fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Dead Men Tell No Tales doesn't quite measure up to the gloriously gonzo original trilogy. But it still makes its mark as a grounded adventure, or as grounded as a supernatural pirate movie can be. If this is the start of a new series, it is a step in the right direction. If it indeed acts as a series finale as promised, then the franchise can exit stage left with honor. Best of all, this fifth offering allows viewers to forget that On Stranger Tides ever happened.

To the extent we even needed a second film after the shockingly good Gore Verbinski original, I will defend Verbinski’s trilogy's kitchen sink excess until the end. The filmmaker's seemingly jovial pirate adventure gave way to a grim and piercing piece of post-9/11 criticism, with the seemingly good British army using the threat of piracy to abuse power to such an extent that they became villains who murdered whistleblower politicians and hanged children. It wasn’t quite the carefree escapism that audiences wanted but, like the (also underrated) Matrix sequels, I admired the ambition and the refusal to give in to optimistic fantasy.

Jack Sparrow is still a relative drag on the proceedings, as he’s been more “fly in the ointment” than “useful rogue” at least since Dead Man’s Chest. Depp is fine, but the character’s shtick is a lot less funny than it was 14 years ago when it was something of a surprise to see a respected thespian hamming it up in an otherwise straight-faced mega-budget action fantasy. Bardem chews exactly as much scenery as you’d expect, while Thwaites and Scodelario make a charming hero/heroine match. They don’t try to mimic Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, and the movie is better for it.

There is a timely subtext about an educated woman facing persecution and then having to manage stupid men whose gender gives them authority and the presumption of competence. Aside from that, and the emotional pull of tying up loose ends in the Pirates of the Caribbean mythology, there isn’t much here beyond superficial pleasures. The pleasures are genuine, and those merely seeking a full-throated pirate adventure with good company will walk away satisfied. The film looks gorgeous, and the action (save for the somewhat murky and chaotic finale) is well-staged and coherent. Alas, I found the chases-to-swordplay ratios to be tilted in the wrong direction.

Dead Men Tell No Tales is miles better than On Stranger Tides, and those who wanted a more grounded and less fantastical adventure may prefer it to Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End. I still adore those shoot for the moon blowouts, for their sheer chutzpah, for their grim political commentary and for that time not so long ago when we could never imagine a bigger and more obscenely overstuffed blockbuster than At World’s End. The film, under two hours and relatively level-headed, ends on an elegant and surprisingly moving note. If this is to be the end, it works as a fitting finale.

Read full review at Forbes

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆   

  

Cap'n Jack's panto's back

Mike McCahill

Given the sorry fate of other projects derived from Disney theme-park attractions – The Country Bears (2002), The Haunted Mansion (2003) – it’s astonishing that the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise should have remained financially seaworthy through four passable-to-indifferent features. With Pirates 5 (subtitled Dead Men Tell No Tales in the US, and Salazar’s Revenge in a number of other countries) the cracks in the hull become unignorable.

Orlando Bloom has pleaded for reduced participation, handing his sextant to on-screen offspring Brenton Thwaites; Skins alumna Kaya Scodelario inherits Keira Knightley’s corsets. The series, in other words, has entered its Muppet Babies or Scrappy-Doo phase, with all the pop-cultural heft that implies.

There’s fresher blood behind the camera, too, not entirely unwelcome after the avant garde tedium of Gore Verbinski’s three-hour send-off At World’s End and Rob Marshall’s by-the-numbers On Stranger Tides. Norwegians Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, fresh from the Oscar-nominated Kon-Tiki, are keener than their predecessors to spend time at sea – some consolation to anybody wondering how interested this series really is in pirating – and toss much of the ballast that clogged previous instalments overboard. Dead Men Tell No Tales moves at a faster rate of knots than any Pirates film; trouble is, nothing has really been added. It’s the same soggy ride, set to a marginally preferable speed.

Depp duly does what Depp does in these films – he swaggers, he rolls those kohl-heavy Keith Richards eyes, he leers at his younger female co-star – but this franchise has always been about delivering pantomimic nonsense, and lots of it. So it is that Golshifteh Farahani (who starred in last year’s Paterson) is bald with rank teeth as a conniving witch; so it is Paul McCartney momentarily shows up as Sparrow’s scouse uncle. After Becks in King Arthur, it’s not the season’s worst celeb cameo – rather sweetly, Macca strolls on, tells a joke, and walks off, thumbs semi-aloft – but this isn’t A Hard Day’s Night so much as A Very Easy Paycheque.

Viewer value-for-money proves more debatable. The Pirates series hasn’t delivered a memorable set piece since Dead Man’s Chest’s oversized waterwheel, and time and again this plumps for distraction over consequence, flooding the screen with images that attain scale – like the ship that rears up on its haunches in readiness for attack – but not much meaning. The much-trailed zombie shark sequence comes to feel like watching somebody playing a tie-in video game.

Maybe the franchise’s success lies in the bountiful downtime it offers beleaguered consumers: even with the wind in its sails here, long stretches of fruitless exposition invite one to have a pee, text a friend, make funeral arrangements, whatever. The rock’n’roll irreverence Pirates once claimed to have freighted into multiplexes has now long since drifted over the horizon.

Read full review at Guardian

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆  

  

Johnny Depp's shtick keeps the franchise afloat

Robbie Collin

“This may seem a peculiar request, but could someone explain why I’m here?” says Johnny Depp, in character as Captain Jack Sparrow, as soon as he appears in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film.

It’s a reasonable question, and one the film is wise to preempt. Because the necessity of a fifth instalment in this already long-winded franchise – particularly six years after the weak fourth, On Stranger Tides, failed to make an impression – is not exactly shiningly apparent.

Soon enough, though, the point of Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge begins to crystalise. The film’s directors, Joaquin Rønning and Espen Sandberg, are adherents of the J.J. Abrams school of ancestor worship – and having come of age in the 1980s golden days of Spielberg, Lucas and Zemeckis, they’ve been tasked with recreating them by a studio (in this case, Disney) with its own rose-tinted hankering for a time when the franchise in question hadn’t yet been run into the mud.

The test for Rønning and Sandberg – a Norwegian duo whose previous film, the 2012 seafaring adventure Kon-Tiki, was nominated for a foreign-language Oscar – is that the original Pirates film, The Curse of the Black Pearl, came out in 2003, so the short-circuit shock of nostalgia could have never been as potent here as it was in, say, Jurassic World, let alone Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

There’s no question they’ve recaptured, or at least synthesised, some of the essence of the original Gore Verbinski film. But the gonzo-Wagnerian backstory the franchise subsequently built up hasn’t been sufficiently pruned – and with so many characters to juggle, the story feels less like a coherent chain of events than a bundle of obligatory subplots.

And action sequences, of course, two of which really click. In an early bank heist, Sparrow and his cronies make off with the bank itself, while a terrific mid-film escape from a public execution unfolds in a kind of whirring, clockwork frenzy, and takes in some ingenious business with a spinning guillotine and the unimprovable, Laurel and Hardy-calibre line: “I’m not one to complain normally, but this basket is full of heads.”

Depp’s shtick is fresher than you might expect, particularly during these bits, the surprisingly un-dreadful Paul McCartney cameo, and some spiky, double-entendre-laced back-and-forths. It’s a pity that some later set-pieces, including the messy and overlong climax, just look like mirages of pixels. Swashbuckling is so much more fun when something’s actually there to buckle the swash to.

Knowing what’s going on also helps. The film’s prologue assumes, optimistically, that cinema-goers will immediately recall the importance of an underwater ship called The Flying Dutchman, and why Orlando Bloom might be stranded on it with a bad dose of barnacle acne.

With Jack Sparrow repositioned as a tipsy mentor, Carina becomes the film’s de facto heroine: she can argue her rivals into knots, while her astronomical knowhow leads to her being mistaken for a witch. If Jeff Nathanson’s script plays the ‘But she’s a girl!’ card a few too many times, it also doesn’t sell her short when things come to the crunch.

The further adventures of these two would be a tantalising prospect were this the first film in a franchise rather than the fifth one. But a post-credits teaser to set up Pirates VI heralds the return of another face from the past. A mostly fun partial reset, but this series needs to slip its moorings and make for new horizons.

Read full review at Telegraph

Not Very Well, Anyway

A. O. SCOTT

“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” — is, by contrasts, long and punishing. Its pleasures are so meager, its delight in its own inventions so forced and false, that it becomes almost the perfect opposite of entertainment. To insist otherwise is a variation on the sunk cost fallacy. Since you exchanged money for fun, fun is surely what you must have purchased, and you may cling to that idea in the face of contrary evidence. But trust me on this: This movie would be a rip-off even if someone paid you to see it.

Because, to be honest, it’s barely a movie at all. The first installments of the “Pirates” franchise conquered skepticism with exuberance and charm. Somehow, a theme-park ride combined with clever, madcap visuals and Johnny Depp’s scapegrace showboating added up to something fresh. But that spirit is long gone. Mr. Depp, as Capt. Jack Sparrow, goes through the motions like a washed-up rock star reprising his greatest hits in a half-empty auditorium. The images are so dark and muddy that you can’t see what’s going on well enough to know why you don’t care. The plot twists, Easter eggs and surprises are either obvious or labored. You can’t spoil something that’s already thoroughly rotten.

Now and then you get a reminder of why you might have enjoyed the earlier movies.

Two appealing young people (Kaya Scodelario and Brenton Thwaites) meet on a quest for a mysterious and powerful object. They are joined by Sparrow and pursued by old and new enemies: the British Navy; the greedy pirate Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush); and an army of ghouls led by the spectral Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem), known as the butcher of the sea.

This goes on for more than two hours. You are invited to sit through every last name on the lengthy end credits for a teasing extra scene of a couple asleep on linen sheets, a reminder of how you might have better spent the time. It would be a spoiler to identify those bedfellows, but the bigger spoiler is that apparently another sequel is on the way.

Read full review at New York times

Movie Rating ★★☆☆  

Long, loud and overstimulating   

Michael O'Sullivan

It’s great to have a job watching — and then writing about — movies. But why does “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” have to feel so much like work?

To be sure, it’s always been something of an effort to keep track of who’s alive or dead or undead in this multi-sequel epic featuring walking pirate ghosts and characters who get killed off in one installment, only to be magically resurrected in the next — especially after what feels like eight long movies.

What do you mean, this is only the fifth one? At over 12 hours total running time, the “Pirates” saga is starting to make the storytelling in “The Lord of the Rings” feel fleet by comparison. And a post-credits stinger scene tacked onto the new film hints that “Dead Men Tell No Tales” may not be the “final ad­ven­ture” after all, as trailers once promised.

Johnny Depp, right, reprises his role as Jack Sparrow and Brenton Thwaites, left, plays a son trying to save his shipwrecked father in the fifth installment of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. (Peter Mountain/Walt Disney Studios)

There are naval chase scenes and booming cannons, and more visual effects than you can shake a cutlass at, including one scene that resembles the parting of the Red Sea in “The Ten Commandments.” Another sequence, featuring Jack stuck in a guillotine that is twirling around and around, like a lethal fidget spinner, is particularly fun, if also characteristic of the amusement-park aesthetic of the film, which seems capable of inducing excitement, exhaustion and nausea, in that order.

Yes, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” remains true to its Disney theme park roots. Loud, overstimulating and hard to take in all in one sitting, it feels like the vacation that you’ll need a vacation from.

Read full review at Washington Post