'Dead Men Tell No Tales' Will Make You Wish They Offed Jack Sparrow Four 'Pirates' Movies Ago

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES

"Let me tell you a tale of the greatest treasure known to man," pronounces Brenton Thwaites, teeth gleaming white, cheekbones so sharp you could carve a chook on them, at the long-awaited end to the interminable Dead Men Tell No Tales. The line plays as something to laugh at, but not as it was intended. Because an audience that’s just suffered through the two long hours of this perfunctory franchise instalment will know that such a tall tale of high-seas derring-do can be the source of mind-dulling, bum-numbing boredom.

Dead Men Tell No Tales is a film that nobody asked for, a branded corporate tchotchke that’s bright, busy, and colourful, but also artless, joyless, mirthless. Sailing the Pirates Of The Caribbean mothership, again, back into familiar waters, screenwriter Jeff Nathanson can only summon a tepid, tedious parade of contrived emotions, slapstick buffoonery, panto mugging, and disbelief-deflating action set-pieces. There’s a search for treasure, high-seas magic, endless cannon-fire, a few random explosions and a “hilarious” scene, in which Johnny Depp is “hilariously” forced to marry an ugly hag, that robbed me of my will to live.

The behind-the-scenes tales of Drunken Depp — and those misty watercolour memories of more innocent, Boo-&-Pistol-deportation times — prove more interesting than the film itself: a self-cannibalising ‘soft reboot’ that, at five films in, hopes to move away from old staples Depp and Geoffrey Rush, and into a new generation.

And, so, Thwaites and Kaya Scodelario essentially run back the old Orlando Bloom/Keira Knightboat roles, with sexless sexual tension, if-you-can-actually-call-it ‘banter’, leading-man blandeur, headstrong woman-ry, etc. He’s Bloom’s only begotten son, and she’s in search of the treasure that ties her to the father she never met; Dead Men Tell No Tales following Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 into the overwrought realm of Generic Blockbuster Daddy Issues.

They have to learn to stop squabbling, and team up with Depp to escape execution at the hands of the British Empire, find the treasure, and elude a Ghost Ship of waterlogged, mid-decaying, spectral Spanish sailors. These ranks of the spooky undead are led by Javier Bardem, cashing a cheque in Frankenstein make-up, ohaguro teeth, and disorienting digital dysmorphia. He commands a whole galleon of ghostly pixels, a vast cast of extras in various states of half-erasure; these greyscale villains emblematic of the film’s general over-reliance on CGI.

Dead Men Tell No Tales was shot on the Gold Coast, which is only really revealed in the small roles for David Wenham and Bruce Spence, and/or if you see one of your friends as an extra. In reality, it’s shot in no place; people moving amidst rickety Potemkin sets, or characters stranded in a digital backlot. While directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg — last seen making the Norwegian seafarin’ saga Kon-Tiki — fill their film with plenty o’ pirate-movie tropes (flappin’ Jolly Rogers, hauled mainsails, nonsensical rope-swings, anchor-chains clanking), there’s never a moment in which an audience can actually imagine, say, salt spray stinging their faces.

Instead, the movie is built on an unending overload of retina-grating pixel-pushing. There’s the entry-level fantasy of a ship-in-a-bottle swelling up to be full-size three-master (just add water!), a ghost-shark-pulls-a-boat scene so cartoonish it seems beamed in from Jabberjaw, and a parting-of-the-sea finale that had yr old pal Film Carew’s peepers convulsively eye-rolling behind the mandatory 3D glasses.

And, worst of all, there’s a post-credits teaser that sets the stage for the next film in the franchise, a dread-inducing proposition for anyone who’s born witness to the diminishing returns of each obligatory outing. The Pirates Of The Caribbean series now totals 726 minutes; or, two hours longer than Claude Lanzman’s 10-hour documentary masterwork Shoah. Monopolising so much multiplex screen time, you’d hope the franchise might have something to say, but Dead Men Tell No Tales clarifies the essential advertorial nature of its storytelling. Across fourteen years, five films, five screenwriters, four directors, and twelve hours, the message remains unwavering, and unmissable: ‘Visit Disneyland’.