Note, minor spoilers ahead.

After a six-year break, the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise has returned with the fifth overall entry in the series, Dead Men Tell No Tales. Though a solid film and a respectable entry in what has become a blockbuster franchise for Disney, its lack of anything remotely new or fresh kind of hurts it in the end.

The story follows a variety of people who are all seeking the Trident of Poseidon for their own reasons. Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites), the son of Will Turner, pursues the artifact in order to break the curse that ties his father to the Flying Dutchman. Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario) has been hunting clues for it for years after working to decode a notebook left to her by her father. The British Navy hopes to find it for the ability to end piracy and control the seas. The ghostly, cursed Captain Armando Salazar (Javier Bardem) hopes to find the Trident for its power over the ocean as well as to exact revenge on his nemesis, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), who is also interested in the Trident but for less obvious reasons.

And that’s basically the whole plot – a bunch of different factions all seek the Trident of Poseidon, and conflicts occur on the way there. The other big issue is that Salazar, who controls a ship full of cursed ghosts, is hoping to completely eliminate piracy (and Jack Sparrow especially). A commander in the Spanish Navy, Salazar had spent years hunting down pirates before being tricked and humiliated by Jack in an event that trapped him, his boat and his entire crew in the Devil’s Triangle. Now freed from that supernatural prison – thanks to Jack’s carelessness, of course – Salazar is back on the open waters and is bent on revenge.

There’s really not a whole lot of fresh material here, which makes this movie very par for the course for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Depp in the leading role as Jack Sparrow is exactly as he has been for the previous four movies. Geoffrey Rush is once again back as Hector Barbossa, and in this film manages to show a more tender side to the character than we’ve really seen before.

Thwaites and Scodelario as Henry and Carina are, essentially, just Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann 2.0, though with a lot less chemistry. They end up getting together in the end, which came off as remarkably hamhanded given that they have zero chemistry. There were parts of Carina’s character that I did enjoy – the fact that she is labeled a witch simply because she is intelligent seemed like some sneaky social commentary, too – but by the end she came off as kind of a Mary Sue trope. Her connection to other parts of the main cast combined with how she ended up with Henry just came off as a little too perfect; it would have been nice for her to have some real flaws.

Javier Bardem is the real standout of the cast here. He’s at the top of his creep game as Salazar, who is perhaps the best villain this series has seen since Davy Jones showed up in the second movie. He’s dynamic and his motivations are easy to sympathize with, plus he genuinely looks real cool.

As has been rather standard for this series, the visuals are honestly stunning. Besides the over-the-top ship battles, there’s several other sequences that are likely to have audiences going “wow.” The ghostly effects used on Salazar, his ship and crew are also remarkable and really unlike anything that Pirates of the Caribbean has done before.

Unfortunately, at 129 minutes long, Dead Men Tell No Tales feels somewhat bloated; there were times where I felt it was actually much longer than that because of how the story dragged at certain points. The entire subplot with the British Navy probably could have been cut out – it serves no real purpose besides showing off what Salazar’s ship can do, and there were other ways to achieve that effect. Jack’s whole “get the gang back together” story at the port town probably could have been cut in half; it features an absolutely preposterous bank heist which, while visually entertaining, did nothing for the plot.  

If you already are a fan of this series, then Dead Men Tell No Tales will likely scratch your itch for more Pirates of the Caribbean content. But if you haven’t been into the franchise so far, this isn’t going to get you interested now. Overall, Dead Men Tell No Tales is a solid and entertaining movie, though clearly not without its flaws; its lack of anything new for the franchise prevents it from being a standout even amongst previous entries.

-Carrie Wood