So You Want To Actually Enjoy The Fifth Pirate Movie Without Losing Your Mind
I spent three weekends rewatching the entire franchise recently, and I have to say something most people are too polite to say out loud. The fifth entry, the one everyone calls Dead Men Tell No Tales or Salazar's Revenge, is not great. But it is not as bad as you probably remember it being if you saw it once in 2017 and never thought about it again. The plot itself is actually pretty straightforward if you strip away the product placement and the thirty minutes of padding. Captain Salazar, played by Javier Bardem, escapes the Devil's Triangle after being buried in coral for over a century. He wants to kill every pirate at sea so the Trident of Poseidon can't be used against him anymore. Jack Sparrow is involved because his compass is broken and he needs the Trident to fix it. The rest is just people running between ships and islands while the script searches for somewhere to go next. What most viewers miss on first watch is that the movie is trying to be a different kind of Pirates film. It has actual stakes. Salazar genuinely wants to kill people and he does. The comedy beats are still there, but they take a back seat to the chase. I found this makes the second act drag significantly, but the final act is genuinely watchable for what it is.
Here is a practical point about watching this one. The IMAX rerelease added about eight minutes of extra footage that actually improves the pacing. It does not fix the middle section, but the opening sequence in the Tribunal is longer and sets up Salazar better. If you are going to stream it, check which version you are pulling up. The theatrical cut is noticeably weaker. There is also a technical detail that matters more than it should. The color grading on the final battle scenes is heavily desaturated, leaning into blue and gray tones. This was done to contrast with the warmer palette of the earlier films. From a viewing standpoint, it makes the underwater sequences hard to parse. I ended up adjusting the brightness on my TV specifically for those scenes. It is the kind of thing nobody tells you about. Dead Men Tell No Tales had a troubled production. Original director Gonzalo López-Gallego was let go and replaced by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, who had never helmed a big-budget studio film before. The script went through numerous rewrites, and you can feel it in scenes that resolve too quickly just to get to the next set piece. The trident itself, which should be a major plot device, gets underused in the third act. That is not your fault as a viewer, it is just the result of editing choices made under schedule pressure.
If you want the best way to experience this movie without the usual complaints, here is what I do. Watch it on a decent display, not a phone. The practical effects used on the ship decks, particularly the Kraken scene, are far better than the CGI that fills the rest of the runtime. Pause during the dialogue-heavy scenes if you need to, because the script occasionally wanders into territory that does not lead anywhere useful. Skip the midnight trailer binges from 2017, this film does not reward that kind of attention. The performances are the actual saving grace here. Javier Bardem commits fully to being a terrifying antihero rather than playing it for laughs. Kevin McNally returns as Jellybean and gives the most grounded performance in the entire franchise. Sarah Grace is fine in her limited screen time. Johnny Depp is doing the Jack Sparrow routine, which is exactly what you expect and exactly what the movie needs even when it feels exhausted. Bottom line, this is a mediocre pirate movie that benefits from being watched with lowered expectations. It is not the peak of the series. It is not even close. But it is watchable, and if you give it the same patience you would give a summer blockbuster that knows what it is, it delivers enough to justify an evening. The story works at a basic level. The action is competent. The one genuine scare in the whole film is memorable. That is all you can realistically ask for from this one.
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