“All Pirates Must Die”
Directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg
Starring Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Geoffrey Rush, Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Kevin McNally
Henry Turner (Thwaites) is obsessed with saving his father from the curse of The Flying Dutchman. Carina Smyth (Scodelario) is obsessed with uncovering the location of the Trident of Poseidon to validate her faith in the father who abandoned her as a baby, with nought but a diary to her name. As the trident can raise any curse of the sea, these two quests coincide, but not before Henry has run afoul of the British, and of the spectral pirate-hunter Salazar (Bardem), who sends him out with a message to Jack Sparrow (Depp) that he will be coming for him when his curse breaks, which, despite the fact that Salazar has been champing at the bit for this for decades, happens almost immediately.
Carina and Henry fall in with Sparrow, then with Hector Barbossa (Rush), whose pirate empire has been left in tatters by Salazar’s depredations. The Black Pearl is released from its bottle, and our dubious heroes race to the trident against Salazar’s Silent Mary, and also the British, but honestly, they don’t really matter much. The good – and Jack Sparrow – triumph, the wicked are destroyed, and Keira Knightley probably earns more than anyone else on the film bar Depp for a thirty-second, non-speaking cameo.
What’s wrong with it?
The film that I saw was called ‘Salazar’s Revenge‘, because… I don’t know. Because the classic, pirate-related line ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales‘, which acts as a recurring motif in the film, wasn’t evocative enough?
Man, there’s a lot going on in this film, and so little of it that we’re given any reason to care about.
Depp is sleepwalking through the part of Jack Sparrow these days, and that character has gone from skilled, but dissipated pirate, to occasionally and almost inadvertently successful clown. The flashback to his audacious defeat of Salazar by luring him into lethally cursed seas shows that this is a deliberate move. Sparrow is basically past it, a laughably tragic shadow of his former self. He’s still the focus of the film, even though Barbossa, and even Henry and Carina, are more interesting, and more directly involved in the plot.
Despite planning for this to be the final film in the franchise, Sparrow resists the logical, indeed the only reasonable fate for his character; a final chance to sacrifice himself after a life of constantly increasing selfishness. Instead he wonders off, the captain of the Black Pearl once more, presumably to piss it all away on booze before the next film.
The credit scene teases the return of the cursed Davy Jones, but supposedly all the curses of the sea have been broken.
Speaking of curses, why was Will Turner going all crab? Wasn’t that supposed to be because of Jones’s corruption of the duty? I thought that was why everyone de-shellfished when Will took over.
The Silent Mary opens like a huge maw to close on enemy ships. It’s a step too far, along the route begun with the barnacle-encrusted Flying Dutchman, and it looks just a little ridiculous.
What’s right with it?
Geoffrey Rush, pro that he is, sells the fuck out of Barbossa’s final face turn and all the feels involved. His heroic sacrifice moves, despite the lacklustre surroundings and his near-diabolical beginnings.
Thwaites does okay with a bland role, and Scodelario does a lot to convince me that the problem with Theresa in the Maze Runner films is the character and not the actor.
Bardem is a decent villain, we know this, although it would be nice to see him do something else.
How bad is it really?
The problem of Salazar’s Revenge – apart from that weird change of title – is that it is so fundamentally pointless. It does surprisingly well in giving us a new protagonist couple who aren’t mere clones of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann – more so with Carina than with Henry, which makes sense as he was so much formed by his father’s curse and his mother’s refusal to take a speaking role – but Jack Sparrow is clearly here because that’s what you do, innit, and there is pretty much nothing that we haven’t seen before. Battles with indestructible revenants; creepy ghost ship; Macguffin; random British pop cameo (in this case, Paul McCartney as Jack’s ‘Uncle Jackie’.)
Best bit (if such there is)?
Barbossa’s final sacrifice elevates the film briefly to something far more moving and dramatic than the rest of the action has earned.
What’s up with…?
- Jack Sparrow? I mean… he’s apparently become completely useless. What, anymore, is the point of him?
- Jack’s assertion that Smyth is an unusual name? Neither he nor Barbossa have asked for written ID of any kind, and they’re just pronouncing her name ‘Smith’, which is about as far from an unusual name as you can get.
- The curse of the compass? I’m all for evolving mythologies, but like the Transformers franchise, Pirates has a mythology that just spontaneously mutates like a drunken hagunennon.
- Salazar’s crusade? If the Silent Mary all-but wiped out the pirate community when Jack was in his teens, why are there so many old pirates in this series? What was Blackbeard doing?
- Skepticism? I mean, there are so many monsters in this world, and the East India Company was previously looking to make a deal with an accursed squid-monster. How is there anyone in command of any ship who is still willing to poo-poo talk of cursed waters?
Ratings
Production values – I’m going to admit, it’s hard for me to tell as I watched this on a portable DVD player while we were out of the flat for the boiler to be fixed, so the visuals were never going to be shown at their full advantage. The partial bodies of Salazar’s crew are a new look, but just not as impressive as either the skeletons or Davy Jones’ crustacean encrusted crew. 12
Dialogue and performances – A decent cast give their all, with Rush at the top of the order, but Depp somewhat phoning it in at this point. The dialogue lacks sparkle, but points at least for not repeating the rum joke. 12
Plot and Execution – There are a lot of coincidences at play here (Henry, Carina and Jack all end up in the same prison, at the exact time that Henry has been given a message for Jack, Carina’s diary is about to reveal its secrets thanks to a periodic celestial phenomenon, and Jack has inadvertently summoned Salazar by giving up the compass,) stringing together a pretty stock story of MacGuffin hunting. 16
Randomness – New rules for the compass. Long-lost offspring. 8
Waste of potential – At this point, I have almost no expectations of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, so that was exceeded. 5
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