Swashbuckler loses its edge
While the essence is there, the franchise’s backstory hasn’t been sufficiently pruned
(6) PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: SALAZAR’S REVENGE. Directed by: Joaquin Rønning, Espen Sandberg. Starring: Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Kaya Scodelario, Brenton Thwaites, Geoffrey Rush, Golshifteh Farahani, Orlando Bloom. Showing at: Boardwalk, Hemingways, Walmer Park, Baywest. Reviewed by: 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, 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 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 mid-film escape from a public execution unfolds in a clockwork frenzy and takes in some ingenious business with a spinning guillotine and the un-improvable 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 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.
Things pick up with the arrival of a fresh threat: Capitán Salazar (Javier Bardem), an undead pirate hunter with a complexion of sun- baked mud, and tendrils of hair that drift and float like submerged seaweed.
Salazar wants to find the man he calls ‘Yuck Spurroh’, in the hope he’ll lead him to the Trident of Poseidon – a weapon capable, one thinks, of destroying every pirate on earth.
That mission gives him common purpose with the somewhat fresher-faced Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites), who needs the same magical object to save his father.
Henry’s father, of course, is Bloom’s Will Turner, and Thwaites is more or less playing a reboot of that character. Hunk-wise he’s completely serviceable, but in all other respects a distant second fiddle to his adventuring partner, Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario).
With Sparrow repositioned as a tipsy mentor, Carina becomes the film’s de facto heroine: she can argue her rivals into knots, while her stargazing know-how leads to her being mistaken for a witch.
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.