Starring: Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Kevin McNally and Geoffrey Rush

Directed by Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg

Disney, out now

Five years after the events of On Stranger Tides, things have changed. Will Turner is still cursed to captain the Flying Dutchman but now his and Elizabeth’s son, Henry, is 19.

And a sailor.

And in massive trouble.

After nineteen years of trying to break his father’s curse and track down Jack to help, Henry’s ship is annihilated by Captain Salazar. A Spanish Pirate Hunter who Jack tricked into a state of not-quite death, he wants vengeance and he’s leaving Henry alive to pass that message along.

Meanwhile, Carina Smyth is being tried for witchcraft. Carina isn’t a witch, she’s just cleverer than anyone else on the island and none of them can quite grasp that.  So when Henry washes ashore, and is immediately arrested for treason, Carina is intrigued. And when she finds out they have an objective in common the two find themselves teaming up.

As for Captain Jack Sparrow? He has half a crew, most of a ship and no rum. And that last one is about to cost all of them very dearly…

If you trudged through On Stranger Tides and are worried this is as bad, don’t be. There are at least two genuinely great action sequences, a moment of surprising emotion and heart and the best female lead since Elizabeth Swann. And, like Elizabeth, the movie has no idea what to do with her.

The good news first. The attempted reboot of On Stranger Tides is tried again here but with much more success. Bringing Will and Elizabeth’s son in instantly makes this feel much more connected and also gives the non-Jack male lead something more to do. Poor Sam Claflin was required to do little other than frown and be earnest last time. This time out, Brenton Thwaites has far more of an arc. He’s written very much as Will’s son; earnest and honest as the day is long and more than a little puppyish. Thwaites has a lot of fun with what he’s given to do and he’s a worthy straight man for Jack.

Kaya Scodelario is the best thing to happen to this series in two movies. Her Carina is a fantastically sparky, smart, practical female lead. While she’s cut from the same huffy upper class mould as Elizabeth, her status as an orphan and a genius puts her in a subtly different spot. One of the movie’s absolute best moments is when she and Jack are both on the verge of execution and arguing over who gets to speak their last words. She’s got zero tolerance for any nonsense, is intensely smart, very funny and her past is central to the plot. Once again, a massive improvement on her poor predecessor, Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey’s character shaped-McGuffin in On Stranger Tides.

Elsewhere in the cast, Javier Bardem and Geoffrey Rush turn in great work too. Bardem’s Captain Salazar, hair perpetually floating even on dry land, is a glorious nightmare with a surprisingly sympathetic back story. The film doesn’t quite do enough with him but he gives it the exact spine that Blackbeared, somehow, failed to do with the last film. Likewise, Rush turns in franchise-best work here as Barbosa. He’s still the same arrogant, double-crossing scoundrel but there’s a cost to it now, a sense of time passing that really helps the movie.

And then there’s Jack.

Johnny Depp’s turn in the first three movies is a career highlight. It’s effortless and funny, arch and considered and yet somehow ramshackle and scruffy. Jack in those movies is a joy. Jack here is a chore and the reason for that is as fascinating as it is depressing.

He hasn’t changed. At all.

He’s still a drunk womanizer. Still an arrogant fussy britches with terrible people skills and a profound fondness for not dying in any way, shape or form. He should still be charming. Instead, he’s a hole in the centre of the movie that it never recovers from.

A huge part of that is the way this ties back to the opening trilogy. Jack’s two closest friends, other than Gibbs, were ripped apart by circumstances he was at least partially responsible for. Will was cursed to live forever as the Captain of the Flying Dutchman. Elizabeth sat alone on her Pirate King’s throne, raising her child and knowing full well she’d see the love of her life once a decade.

Jack?

Jack got drunk.

Again.

He’s a spoilt, emotionally stunted idiot who has spent 19 years running from the last close connections he made. That’s not sympathetic, it’s contemptible. Worse, it’s boring. Worse still, it’s just the start of the movie’s problems.

So much time is spent on Jack doing the same thing he always does that Henry doesn’t really get a chance to fully develop. His parents are on screen for under five minutes and a moment that should have colossal emotional weight is spoilt by Jack all but going ‘EWWWWWWW KISSING!’ over it. Worse still, his arc is identical to every other time we’ve been through it; Jack’s an idiot, Jack gets caught, Jack plays a complicated long game, Jack wins, everyone says how great he is, Jack sails off.

He’s a mascot not a character, a greatest hits set list of mannerisms and gestures that barges everything interesting about the movie out of the way. Barbosa’s plot suffers least for this but Henry, Will and Carina are continually all but pushed off the screen. Worse still, there’s a desperately unfunny stop-off at some completely unnecessary fat shaming and sexism that’s indicative of the movie’s laughably bad attitude towards women. While much has been made of Carina’s intelligence and drive, the film laughs at her for it every single chance it gets. She gets no opportunity to Science a problem, where Henry gets every opportunity to laugh at her horrified reaction to magic. Even that isn’t developed enough to be interesting. Instead we get comedic misunderstandings of what ‘horologist’ means. Repeatedly.

For all this, there is actually a lot to enjoy in Salazar’s Revenge. There’s a guillotine/noose escape sequence which can stand with the best the series has ever done, a delightfully literal bank robbery and a white knuckle finale involving some immensely fancy sailing. But all this, the charm of the new cast and the pleasure of seeing the old return can’t cover up how tired, and unlikeable, Jack is right now.

Verdict: This pirate needs to put in to port. And if these movies ever want to be interesting again there’s a lot of work to do before letting him back out on the open sea. 5/10

Alasdair Stuart