This Week's Movies - Pirates Of The Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge

Cap'n Jack Sparrow is back! Again! And so is Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), Will Turner (Orlando Bloom, briefly) and Elizabeth Swan (Kiera Knightley, even more briefly), as well as that capuchin monkey you may or may not remember. Newcomers include Skins' Kaya Scodelario as an errant horologist and Javier Bardem as a ghostly bad guy. Pretty much everybody is after watery macguffin "The trident of Poseidon", which promises to break all curses at sea (because of course it does). Oh, and Paul McCartney rocks up for a bit as a card-playing prison pirate. Yes he does.

Pros:

The action set-pieces have jumped the zombie shark - did I mention there were zombie sharks? Well, there are zombie sharks - with five totally bananas sequences dotted throughout the movie, including a bank heist where an actual bank is actually heisted, and a fight involving an out of control guillotine and a dwarf with a cannon. These films have gone full panto now (if the panto starred award-winning, world-famous millionaires and had the budget of a small European principality's GDP). In short: the action is off the hook. The pirate's hook. At the end of a pirate's arm... oh forget it.

We could really do with a big silly movie that doesn't take itself too seriously, with characters we know and love, where nothing really matters and it's all a bit of a laugh. This is that film. It's an utter mess, and nothing really makes sense, and you never know 100% what's going on from one moment to the next, but it's a sunny summer movie and Johnny Depp does his sozzled swashbuckler thing and for two hours you're totally checked out. In a good way.

There's a sense this may well be the final Pirates adventure, and if you've seen them all and care about the characters, this is pretty much a must-watch, putting a neat bow on quite a few ongoing storylines and sneaking in a few twists here and there too. Yes, there's a general sense they were making it up as they went along, but come the end you'll appreciate there was a *bit* of a plan underneath it all.

Cons:

It's too long, too jumbled, and at times, much too much. Keep your eyes open, because a lot is going to be fired at your eyeballs and you may struggle to keep up. What doesn't help is Jack Sparrow occasionally behaving in a way that suits the story, but not his character. Maybe I care too much, but he's the heart and soul of the whole operation and it's not a nice feeling when you wonder... "Why is Cap'n Jack doing that?"

The film feels like a cover of the series' greatest hits so far. The ghostly bad guys are so very similar to the part-time skeletons and deep sea crusties we have seen before, and while familiarity is comforting, we had plenty of that in the fourth one, they should have mixed it up a bit more for the fifth.

Did I mention the zombie sharks?

Three word review: Not entirely arrrrrrrghful.