There’s little effort to flesh out the mythical and mystical aspects of the movie, with characters instead drawing upon seemingly baseless belief and convenient objects to formulate a search for the Next Big Thing - in this case, the Trident of Poseidon. The witch makes a brief appearance later, her character existing only as an (ultimately unresolved) convenience for anyone who needs it. She does this without demanding payment, instead being content with insinuating that the pirate will one day pay his blood debt as some weak foreshadowing to a future plot point. Barbossa, for example, makes a quick visit to a witch who provides him with everything he needs to know. The movie’s writing was weak and scattered, drawing upon convenient plot elements and deus ex machina to propel the film forward in lieu of an actual storyline. We once again meet him as a pirate drunk on rum, running from the law, getting caught, and narrowly escaping death.
The character most guilty of this was Sparrow himself, his entire purpose seemingly to provide weak jokes and display improbably great luck. Characters felt, more than a few times, like thin cardboard versions of their past selves, existing only to cover a checklist of rehashed wisecracks. Though this segue into history was skillfully wedged into the overall storyline, we can’t say the same about other movie elements. The movie works in a bit of series history, giving us a look at a young Sparrow and how he made his first supernatural enemy. The movie starts out interestingly enough, introducing us to the latest installment’s bad guy pirates: Captain Armando Salazar and his crew who, we eventually learn, are cursed dead men hellbent on getting revenge against series drunk Captain Jack Sparrow. Dead Men Tell No Tales was very much another Sparrow-Barbossa adventure, one that shoehorns in nods and winks to past films with little substance between. The latest Pirates installment brought back the original cast, as we’d been promised, though that claim is disingenuous: Orlando Bloom had an anemic, almost pointless role in the early movie, and his love interest Keira Knightley was even more scarce, appearing for half a minute or so near the movie’s end.
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