There are precisely three things that are enjoyable about the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie: a scene involving Jack Sparrow and a guillotine, Javier Bardem’s Captain Salazar occasionally using his cool whale skeleton-like ship (and his ghost sharks!), and the ending. Everything else is laughable at best, and visually incomprehensible and completely emotionally uninvolving at worst. The best thing I can say about Dead Men Tell No Tales is that it will make you want to rewatch the first and second POTC installments, but I can only say that because the ending practically invites you to go back and watch those better movies with better characters. The ending tugs on your emotional heartstrings so much that I suspect some people will leave the cinema thinking they actually just watched a good movie, and I personally would love to forget that I wasted two hours and $16 on this piece of shit, but I can’t. Endings, while important, cannot change the quality of the film that preceded it - and what preceded it was absolute garbage.

I think an apt comparison would be between this film and last year’s masterpiece Gods of Egypt, not only because both films star Geoffrey Rush and the charisma vacuum known as Brenton Thwaites (joining the ranks of Sam Worthington and Jai Courtney as boring generic white Australian dudes that Hollywood keeps trying to foist upon us as supposed “leading men”), but because both films embody the worst of CGI-heavy “mythological” blockbuster movies that seem to be so commonplace these days. The so-called mythological basis of Dead Men Tell No Tales is the Trident of Poseidon, which is a particularly terrible MacGuffin in that it has the oddly specific but highly convenient power to erase all pirates’ curses. There’s also some bullshit about it granting you the power of the sea, but this is never explained nor referred to again. Thwaites’ character Henry wants to get ahold of it to free his father, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), from being cursed to the Flying Dutchman forever; weirdly, Henry Turner is the only character who even has a motivation for wanting the damn thing, but the movie still devolves into a series of terrible “who will get to the ethereal glowing object in the ocean” chase scenes by the end. It makes even less sense once you realize the Trident of Poseidon erases all pirates’ curses so it technically doesn’t even matter who gets ahold of it first.

I might not mind that the plot makes zero sense if any of the characters were worth caring about or had any sort of chemistry, but everyone in this film seems to be either half-asleep or just barely hitting their marks. The abusive elephant in the room is of course Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, and while I wouldn’t say he’s awful, at least the filmmakers were prescient enough to give us ten other “characters” to think about instead of letting the film rest entirely on his shoulders (even if all of those other characters were complete write-offs). We spend an awful lot of time following Sparrow around in the first third of the film as he goes about his drunken antics, apparently for comedic purposes, but it’s very unfunny and gets real tiresome real fast; the film also loves to play the iconic rousing POTC theme whenever Jack Sparrow does anything more complicated than tie his shoes and it’s as laughable as when they used to play the James Bond theme whenever Sean Connery would do mundane things like check a hotel room for bugs in the early 007 films. Captain Jack has one somewhat amusing scene, which is the aforementioned one involving a guillotine, but otherwise the character is nowhere near as cool as he used to be (or as the film seems to think he is).

Javier Bardem and Geoffrey Rush are probably the “best” performances in the film but - and it pains me to say this, as it’s become such a common complaint about movies that it almost doesn’t hold any credence as a complaint anymore - the overuse of CGI strips them of whatever presence they might have contributed to the film. Rush in particular has a laughably bad death scene in which he falls from a ten-storey-tall ship anchor chain into a vertical wall of seawater in slow motion, right after demonstrating the second instance of Chekhov’s Tattoo in cinematic history (the first being Incendies) to his astronomer daughter Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario). I won’t even discuss her character too much because it angers me to see an actor like Scodelario that I actually like be reduced to the absolute joke of a character she played here. Maybe some people will be distracted by the fact Carina seemed to be wearing really effective push-up bras most of the time, but to me the complete uselessness of a character who had to announce she was a woman and a scientist in seemingly every scene just signals to me that Hollywood has a long way to go before credible and empowered female characters are the norm rather than the exception.

I’m going to need some time to properly articulate my thoughts about this garbage. I still have a headache from trying to watch the battle sequences they for some reason decided to stage in almost total darkness, and from trying to figure out why anyone cared about anyone else. (Seriously, people in this film go from hating Jack Sparrow to willing to die for him in the span of about five minutes.) It’s not worth seeing by any means, but the ending - which feels ripped out of a completely different movie and is unexpectedly sweet - is nice, I guess. However, I can’t recommend seeing that if it also means sitting through two hours (!) of cardboard cutouts going on some half-assed CGI quest for revenge/a terrible MacGuffin, and if it means we as a moviegoing audience dupe the filmmakers (using our wallets) into thinking we want more of these kinds of films.