Review

Captain Cursed

Johnny Depp takes an umpteenth turn for the worse as Jack Sparrow in painful Pirates

Captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) makes a point while debating Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney’s The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.
Captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) makes a point while debating Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney’s The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

For a series entirely predicated on ancient nautical curses, it's ironic that its star, Johnny Depp, has long been afflicted with one of his own: The Curse of the Giant Franchise Movie Series. In his fifth (or is it sixth?) reprise as Captain Jack Sparrow, it's pretty clear this is a marriage of extreme financial convenience and little else.

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Jack Sparrow Wanted poster from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

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Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem) is a powerful, maniacal and undead Spanish Navy pirate hunter trapped in the Devil’s Triangle in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

Seriously, no one I asked at the theater had any idea what number film this is by now.

The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

75 Cast: Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Kevin McNally, Golshifteh Farahani, David Wenham, Stephen Graham, Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush, Keira Knightley

Directors: Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg

Rating: PG-13, for sequences of adventure violence, and some suggestive content

Running time: 2 hours, 9 minutes

In the first film, shot more than a decade ago in 2003, Depp was something of a revelation: a cross between a thoroughly sauced Keith Richards, whom he reportedly based the mannerisms upon, and a straight-faced Buster Keaton. Depp played him with a drunken indignation and a faulty sense of his own nonexistent legend, which spun comic gold out of what surely would have been a throwaway part in an otherwise pedestrian movie. The producers were savvy enough to see how Sparrow was far more interesting than their flat leading man (played by Orlando Bloom), and gave Depp full reign over his amusingly cockeyed creation.

Now, umpteen sequels later, he's like a recurring character in an SNL skit that long ago lost his joie de vivre and now gets trotted out as a quick, brazen audience pleaser. For Depp, the character represents a financial windfall of unprecedented proportions, and has carried him from curious character actor to full-blown star, but the cost, it would seem, is that he's doomed to forever don the heavy mascara and beaded dreads of his most popular -- and increasingly uninspired -- creation.

It's not that he hasn't tried to diversify. Utilizing his newfound wattage, Depp has appeared in many other large-budget films -- playing everyone from the Mad Hatter to Tonto -- but none of them have stuck, and his increased bizarre affectations have only further put him in Nicolas Cage territory as a decent actor who can't modulate himself. With every successive failure, his star gets a little more tarnished, and this film, for all its computer-generated spectacle and frantic camera work, will likely do him no favors.

The story this time involves Henry (Brenton Thwaites), the son of the accursed Will Turner (Bloom, in a brief cameo), who has vowed to free his father of his watery fate by securing Poseidon's trident, which conveniently disavows all existing curses. He meets Carina (Kaya Scodelario), a beautiful young astronomer frequently targeted as a witch who, it just so happens, is also desperate to find the trident, using an indecipherable map given to her by her father as he left her at an orphanage.

The pair eventually engage Sparrow for their adventure, even as he is being pursued by a vengeful British sea captain (David Wenham) and an accursed former Spanish captain named Salazar (Javier Bardem, missing about a third of his head). Salazar was tricked years ago by Sparrow into sailing his vessel into the rocky cove of the Devil's Triangle, where he and his crew were doomed to live as mutilated wraiths.

Along the way there are numerous scrapes, escapades, and giant set-pieces, with Sparrow narrowly avoiding catastrophes almost entirely by dumb luck. Some predicaments are at least mildly inspired, such as when a guillotine blade swings over his neck like a pendulum as he spins around in a parabola, but most are more of the dutifully outrageous variety, with endlessly self-satisfied deadpan meant to carry most of the comedy by itself.

Sparrow, like his two companions, is also continually arrested, detained, locked up and tied to main masts. The film doesn't have much more to offer in terms of plotting, so in lieu of further movement, screenwriters Jeff Nathanson and Terry Rossio have padded the film's running time with these interminable obstacles to maintain the characters' perilous situations. No sooner does Sparrow escape one complicated caper before he's again thrown into irons and otherwise detained into another.

Through all this silliness -- along with some truly captivating special effects, including a wild climax that comes after the ocean parts itself into a narrow channel where the final battle concludes -- Depp continues to hit the same notes with Sparrow over and over again. There's his hunched surprise, blinking into the sunlight like a clubgoer emerging from an all-night bender, his yelp of worry when something unexpectedly bad suddenly transpires, his slurry drunken shtick that would make Dudley Moore wince, and all the other mannerisms that made the character popular in the first place. You get the impression he can now throw together a Sparrow performance without bothering to read the script. They fly him out to the Caribbean, throw on his vests and medallions and let him go at it until the camera finally stops rolling.

I suppose there are worse fates than making a fortune playing in the sun and sand of the tropics, but for an actor of Depp's pedigree and former ambition, it has got to feel like a kind of purgatory. The difference is, all he needs to do to break the curse is one simple word: No.

MovieStyle on 05/26/2017

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