Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge is the thirty-eighth film in the series which sees Captain Jack Sparrow return to the role of Johnny Depp, a drunken pirate man. There are other familiar faces, too, like action figure favourites Geoffrey Rush and Orlando Bloom, who don’t have any scenes together because they filmed in separate countries in green screen cubicles. With the addition of a couple of young faces, the gang is reunited for yet another fun, family adventure, full of murdering and scurvy.
Directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, the men responsible for the timeless hit Bandidas, the story concerns an overwhelming desire to find a fork in the middle of the ocean. That the object and its whereabouts are completely irrelevant seems to be lost on the characters, as they spend an entire two-hours and thirty-three minutes looking for it.
In between bouts of boredom, however, there are some trinkets of mildly amusing material, like a phallic telescope joke that the kids are bound to enjoy. There are also some impressive shots, the best being a bird’s eye view of a rocky terrain covered in crystals, which I think was filmed in Islington.
Javier Bardem is in it. He plays Salazar, who, as the title suggests, wants revenge. He has a scabby face and kills people with a ship that yawns, which I suppose makes him the villain of the piece. Yet I felt more aggressively inclined towards other newcomers Kaya Scodelario and Brenton Thwaites, their characters truly embodying the happy-go-lucky ignorance of manipulated consumerists, which has ultimately led to Brexit.