Blu-Ray Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge

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20%
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Boring

Salazar's Revenge runs aground on its voyage to the island of predictability.

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Before sitting down to watch the latest film in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, I would advise a healthy dose of rum to numb the senses; and by ‘healthy’, I mean a quantity Jack Sparrow himself would be proud of. Salazar’s Revenge – also known as Dead Men Tells No Tales or The Fifth Sequel That Nobody Asked For – is a frustratingly predictable film. If you have a general idea of the direction Pirates films generally sail in, you could probably conjure up with a more inventive plot than Disney have here. The highly publicised returns of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly are barely cameos (Knightly doesn’t utter a single word), while Johnny Depp is a less coherent (!!) version of Captain Jack than ever before, relying solely on cringeworthy drunk performances and an ability to slot himself into a plot that actually would play out very similarly without his presence.

Cue forced chemistry between the franchise’s new darlings Carina (Kaya Scodelario) and Henry (Brendan Thwaites), another sub-par villain in Javier Bardem’s titular Captain Salazar, and then poor old Geoffrey Rush is hamfisted into the convoluted mess. A minor positive to mention is the return of ridiculous action sequences that made the original trilogy so iconic – Jack’s brush with a guillotine being particularly memorable – but calling Salazar’s Revenge better than Stranger Tides doesn’t justify its existence. It simply can’t decide whether it’s a final farewell or the start of Chapter 2 for Pirates of the Caribbean, when if everyone’s honest, it probably shouldn’t exist at all.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge (2017), directed by Joaquin Rønning & Espen Sandberg, is released in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray through Walt Disney Studios. Certificate 12A.

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Editor of The Edge 2017-18. Culture Editor before that. Sporadic writer for the Wessex Scene, DJ on Surge, known photobomber of SUSUtv's videos. Bad habits include Netflix, not doing my work and drinking too much tea.

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