Pirates Of The Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge Review - Stay At Home, Rewatch The First One

Certificate – 12A

Directed by – Joachim Ronning, Espen Sandberg

Starring – Johnny Depp; Javier Bardem; Brenton Thwaites; Kaya Scodelario; David Wenham; Geoffrey Rush.

Running Time – 128 minutes (2 hours 8 minutes)

★★✩✩✩

IMAGE VIA DISNEY

Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazer’s Revenge (or Dead Men Tell No Tales if you’re in the US, I don’t know why we have a different name either) is like meeting an old school friend, they use to the be the cool, exciting, fun one but now he’s just a boring old man.

Salazer’s Revenge tells the story of Henry (Thwaites), a headstrong navy sailor, on the search for the legendary Trident of Poseidon. However, he needs the help of a brilliant and beautiful astronomer, Carina Smyth (Scodelario) and Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp) before a deadly ghost ship led by Captain Salazer (Bardem) comes for them.

This was basically, not only a sequel/mini-reboot, a remake of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl as the story was pretty much identical beat for beat.

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I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, it was just boring as the first one (which came out 14 years ago) and it’s a shame they couldn’t reimagine it with something new and interesting as Black Pearl is a modern day family classic. However, even though it is dull it’s much better than the previous three films.

Thwaites and Scodelario were playing the Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley roles. As Thwaites is just a plain as Bloom, which is ironic since he’s playing Will Turner’s son. The only differences with Scodelario is, she had something appealing about her, but the whole “I’m a strong, smart, independent woman thing” was nice, but on the other hand, overplayed.

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Meanwhile, somehow Depp over did it with the drunken Jack Sparrow thing and it was impressive to see him overplay a charactercher of Keith Richards, which was a pain in the arse by the second film.

Elsewhere, Bardem is a sympathetic villain as Captain Salazer and actually pretty scary. The CGI worked really well of the ghost/zombie soldiers and also ghost/zombie sharks were cool.

IMAGE VIA DISNEY

Furthermore, you can’t hear what Sparrow or Salazer were saying in some scenes and the jokes fell dead, I think I may have chuckled once throughout.

They could have knocked off 20 minutes off the running time and it would’ve been a tighter, decently paced film. I didn’t understand why it was over two hours long.

Finally, as a base for a newer Pirates franchise, it’s fine, but they really need to tell interesting, fun films again.

Verdict

A boring, long remake of The Curse of the Black Pearl