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Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge

5/10

Stars: Johnny Depp, Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Geoffrey Rush, Javier Bardem, Orlando Bloom, Kevin R McNally, David Wenham

Director: Joachim Ronning, Espen Sandberg

Yet another outing for the tired old fantasy franchise on the Seven Seas. The McGuffin this time is Poseidon's Trident, which can lift the curses that have rained down on so many seafarers in the course of this seemingly never-ending series.

The key to it all naturally is charcoal-eyed Jack Sparrow (Depp), who magically refloats the Black Pearl and joins the hunt.

Overblown, messy and heavily edited, the film is little more than a jumble of sound and fury. Still, the familiar music does its best to charge the plot, such as it is, along, and things do kind of get moving half-way through, even if the action remains an aimless confusion of ships and special effects.

Depp's slurred-speech buccaneer has gone beyond parody into tedium, though he is rather good as his younger self. Keira Knightley (from the original film) appears briefly at the end, and there's a passable cameo from Paul McCartney, under even more hair and whiskers than the rest of the cast, as Depp's scoundrelly Uncle Jack.

No gold this time though for this over-familiar voyage into cliched chaos.

David Quinlan

USA 2017. UK Distributor: Disney. Technicolor.
121 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 12A.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 1, Drugs 0, Swearing 0.

Review date: 08 Oct 2017

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