Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Okay, sometimes you see a movie simply because you have to review a movie that week and your timeslot is limited, and only the blockbuster that is in all the cinemas has a screening that is convenient for you to get to. So that's why this one.

I tuned out of the Pirates series after the third one. I'd enjoyed the first, had enjoyed a lot of the second, but felt the third was starting to get simultaneously overblown and underpowered, too in love with its own mythology and with not enough really interesting character development to take it any where. So I sat out the fourth one. But I'm back for the fifth one, shot in Queensland for that vaguely authentic tropical feel, and therefore with a few more Australian actors filling out the minor roles (the inevitable Bruce Spence and a not-given-anything-interesting-to-do-in-the-script David Wenham getting the largest of what's going). Geoffrey Rush's Barbosa is possibly the best element of the film this time - he has a gorgeous intro enjoying wealthy crapulence in a Louis XIV wig, and gets what's closest to an emotional arc in the film. Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow is all external tics - it makes you doubt there was ever anything interesting about the performance, which seems like a bad impersonation of itself even while it's going. Javier Bardem is the new baddie, and while the CGI is doing 50% of the work as he sports an impressive semi-drowned look, he does have a suitably crazed enthusiasm for the job of villaning it up.

The new generation of heroes are, sadly, a bit of a dead loss. The series turns out to miss Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley in these roles (both are back as older figures), as their replacements Brenton Thwaites is a reasoable looking chap, and Kaya Scolderio has been decent in other projects, most particularly series 3 and 4 of Skins.The mythology makes very little more sense than it did previously ,and there's not a lot of imspiration anywhere else. The finale does have a few interesting settings and ideas, but it's mostly too little too late. Largely skippable.