Pirates of the Caribbean Salazar’s Revenge Review: The fifth Pirates film hits cinemas this week, but is it any good?
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: SALAZAR’S REVENGE REVIEW
Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge Review
It’s been almost fifteen years since the first Pirates of the Caribbean film arrived in cinemas. The film, based on a popular ride at Disney’s theme parks, took the world by storm and proved that audiences still loved a pirate yarn. Then came two sequels in reasonably rapid succession (2006 and 2007), and with the narrative completed, we thought that was the last we’d seen of Captain Jack Sparrow. Then in 2011 we got another trip around the oceans with Sparrow, this time without his sidekicks, Elizabeth and Will. It lacked the pizzazz of the original trio, but despite lukewarm reviews, went onto the generate a massive box office meaning that film five wasn’t far away. Now, six years later comes Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge (Dead Men Tell No Tales if you live Stateside), but is it any good?
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: SALAZAR’S REVENGE REVIEW
In short, no, not really. Pirates Five steals elements of previous fifth franchise movies; both Step Up All In and Fast Five saw all the fan favourites return, Pirates does the same by bringing all manner of characters back from across the series. In fact, speaking of Fast Five, Pirates seems to be heavily inspired by the Vin Diesel vehicle. Don’t believe me? Well, Pirates Five features the already mentioned returning players, Depp leaping off of a bridge, an Hispanic antagonist, and even a safe being dragged across a city. Yes really. Sadly though, Pirates is missing that magic ingredient that rejuvenated the Fast franchise, The Rock.
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: SALAZAR’S REVENGE REVIEW
In addition to several returning faces, there are of course some new additions. Kaya Scodelario and Brenton Thwaites try as they might, don’t bring anything new to the table. Their characters, Carina and Henry, are in essence just a soulless rehash of Elizabeth Swan and Will Turner. Javier Bardem is the third and final new key player, Salazar. Salazar shares an important history with Jack, and much like Barbossa in the first film, blames Sparrow for his plight. After Jack unknowingly frees Salazar and his men from the Devil’s triangle, Salazar sets out to seek revenge. This is a character that could be so good – he has zombie sharks in his arsenal and isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, but he’s completely mistreated. Bardem is unintelligible for the majority of his screen time. His words are chewed far too much with too thick an accent for Joe Public to decipher. It also doesn’t help that he’s talking out of one side of his face and has a tendency to spit. It’s a real shame as he could have been pretty menacing, instead the audience spend their time asking each other what he just said. He definitely says the word Death once and the word Sparrow several times, but outside of that, I have no idea.
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: SALAZAR’S REVENGE REVIEW
There are also problems in understanding Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow. The character has always had a drunken, slurred mumble, but here Depp has gone a step too far and the result, as with Bardem, is a lot of confused audience members. Depp’s Sparrow, this time, around feels lazy, it’s like he’s played the part for so long that he just can’t be bothered to do more than the expected mumbling and falling over. In the Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Sparrow was magnetic, here he’s just a tired shadow trying desperately to reignite the spark.
The story itself is uninspired, and as with Carina and Henry, is just sad rework of what we’ve seen before. It’s overlong and has too many action pieces. In fact, thinking it through it all, Salazar’s Revenge is is a steady string of action sequences connected by some mumbling. Events in this latest outing also seem to rewrite things that have come before, which is a little insulting to audiences that have stayed with the franchise.
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: SALAZAR’S REVENGE REVIEW
The grand-scale battles lose their impact as they’re buried underneath Hans Zimmer’s score. The score is so loud that it drowns out all of the cannon fires, sword-play et al, producing a lot of loud and distracting white noise. There’s also a lack of imagination, the same situation repeating over and over again. There’s a great scene with zombie sharks and ghosts running on water, but it’s too short and gets lost amongst all the sameness of the rest of them.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge fails to save this sinking franchise on all counts. It’s sad to say, but this film series really should walk the plank once and for all.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge review by Kat Hughes, The Hollywood News, May 2017.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge will be released in UK cinemas on 25th May 2017.
