Ben Oliver

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Do you even have a ship, a crew… pants?
23 October 2020

Yarr it’s time we sent this franchise to Davy Jones’ locker, but Disney wants to use a pirate spell to bring it back to life.

This is a heartless attempt to continue the story through a new ‘generation’ of characters. Instead of trying something new we just get discount Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner. Lazier still, they are both children of characters from the previous films.

As a stand alone piece this is also very weak. The set pieces have none of the flair and creativity we saw even in the relatively poor third film. The script swings way too hard away from actual seafaring action towards dodgy magic, opening up countless plot holes that didn’t need to be there.

A careless mess that fails to entertain, written by people who clearly never saw the first three films.