Bardem oozes menace, but this ship needs new horizons
Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge
12A Cert, 129min
★★★★★ Dir: Joaquin Rønning, Espen Sandberg; Starring: Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Kaya Scodelario, Brenton Thwaites, Geoffrey Rush, Golshifteh Farahani, Orlando Bloom
‘This may seem a peculiar request, but could someone explain why I’m here,” asks 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 Eighties 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 gonzowagnerian 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 sub-plots.
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 Hardycalibre 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 undreadful 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. But things pick up with the arrival of a fresh threat: Capitán Armando Salazar (Javier Bardem), an undead pirate hunter with a complexion of sun-baked mud, tendrils of hair that drift and float like submerged seaweed, and a mouth liable to ooze inky goo in close-up. (Bardem has the kind of face that CGI simply can’t smother, and his performance is persuasively meaty, despite his digital mask.)
Salazar wants to find the man he calls, in a piquant Spanish growl, “Yuck Spurroh”, in the hope he’ll lead him to the Trident of Poseidon – a weapon capable, I think, 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 – seemingly a kind of Swiss Army Mcguffin – to save his father from a curse.
Henry’s father, of course, is Bloom’s Will Turner, and Thwaites is more or less playing a reboot of that character, given the Bloom is now off the rose, as it were. Hunk-wise he’s completely serviceable, but in all other respects a distant second fiddle to his adventuring partner, a plucky stargazer called Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario).
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 know-how 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.