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Oh,if onlydead men told no tales. Then we might have avoided this fifth Pirates of the Caribbeanadventure, which fails to justify its own existence in any way whatsoever.

Well – that's not entirely true. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Talesexists because Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tidesgrossed over a billion dollars at the international box office, and Disney, understandably, would very much like to replicate that success.

But on a narrative or creative level, the new Pirateshas almost nothing of value to offer.

The plot is so stupid complicated that it takes a good 40 minutes to get the main cast in one place, and another 20 minutes to reveal what the deal is with the main villain, a ghost sea captain named Salazar (Javier Bardem).

But all you really need to know is that Salazar, Jack, and Jack's favorite frenemy Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) are all after the same MacGuffin – along with Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites), son of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley's character from the earlier films; and Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario). Some of these people form uneasy alliances, and others of these people are working against each other.

Depp, whose work in the first Pirateswas so revelatory, gives the kind of performance that serves as a depressing reminder of how far he's fallen since then. It's not bad, exactly – he goes through all the motions and mostly gets them right – but it doesn't feel like there's anything like real person under all those tics and accessories. I'd say it seems like he's phoning it in, but we learned recently that he basically is.

And Depp's performance is basically representative of Dead Men Tell No Talesas a whole. Everything is classic Pirates, only more and worse. The new P.Y.T.s feel like cut-rate versions of Bloom and Knightley, with even more forced banter between them. (In fairness to Thwaites and Scodelario, the script does them no favors whatsoever.) There are lots of ancient artifacts linked to dark spells that make even less sense than usual, and twists you can see coming from ten miles away.

Meanwhile, the explosive set pieces have stretched past extravagant and into bloated, making Dead Men Tell No Talesa 130-minute movie that feels like a 180-minute one. And yet, Dead Men Tell No Talesfails to even deliver a single interesting sea battle, which one would think would be the whole point of a movie about pirates. The biggest ocean sequence is set in the dead of night, presumably to hide the fact that that's not really Depp doing all the running and jumping.

The curse of it is that Dead Men Tell No Talesisn't entirely incompetent. It's just competent enough to make it deadly dull, with just enough flashes of potential to make me long for the other, better movie it could've been. The ghost sharks seem like a really fun idea, until (like everything else in this interminable movie) they wear out their welcome, and the CG effects that make Salazar look perpetually underwater are something to behold. Paul McCartney's cameo is totally unnecessary and cheesy as hell, but just silly enough to work.

The one consistently good part of Dead Men Tell No Talesis Geoffrey Rush. Although Barbossa is written as inconsistently as anyone else, Rush has such a strong grasp on this wily character that he's the only one that feels like a real person that we might be able to love or hate or find funny or annoying or pitiable. Pirateswould probably be a better franchise, at this point, if it ditched Depp and made Barbossa the lead.

That'll never happen, though, because Depp is the prize pig of this franchise. At this point, we know what to expect from Pirates of the Caribbean, and Dead Men Tell No Talessuggests that creative expansion isn't one of them. It's happy to just keep swimming in circles, as long as the cash keeps rolling in. That plan seems to be working out fine for Disney; the box office tracking for this one looks solid. But I'm ready to jump ship.

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