How We'd Fix It: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

How We’d Fix It is where we prescribe bloated and uninvited advice to recent pieces of entertainment, because sometimes, we see things that suck a little. 

There is one good scene in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. It comes about halfway through the movie, otherwise known as “the one-hour mark that feels likethe two-hour mark,” or more commonly “the part where my dad sighed and walked out of the theater, even though seeing this godforsaken movie was all his idea.” Yes, Pirates 5 is super bad and there is no reason to see it unless you want to reflect on the diminishing returns of Johnny Depp’s cross-faded style of acting or Orlando Bloom’s good looks.

But, we digress. There is one good scene. It’s a flashback that shows the origin story of the dead men in the movie’s title. The scenario: pirate-hating Spanish captain Salazar—Javier Bardem, trying and failing to gorilla-glue this movie together—is chasing Jack Sparrow’s ship (it might have been the Black Pearl, but I don’t remember and don’t care enough to find out) through a part of the sea called The Devil’s Triangle. The Devil’s Triangle is a tunnel of rock that reduces most ships to splinters, unless those ships are important to the plot. Anyway, Jack Sparrow is headed straight for the Devil’s Triangle, with Javier Bardem in hot pursuit, when Sparrow orders his crew to execute a “bootleg turn,” in which they lasso a nearby crag with some of the ship’s line and swing their ship free of the Devil’s Triangle at the last possible moment. Not expecting the maneuver, Javier Bardem’s ship is forced to stay on course and pass through the Devil’s Triangle, where it explodes and kills everyone because that’s what happens when maritime warships run aground, apparently.

To summarize: The best part in Pirates 5 is when Jack Sparrow pulls off a legitimate naval strategy to thwart his enemies, not when he’s acting like your annoying blackout friend or chasing a fantasy object or saying things that made my dad rub his eyes and crease his forehead.

Paradoxically, that outlying high of Pirates 5 underscores the thing that sunk the series to begin with: The decision to emphasize fantasy above piracy. Curse of the Black Pearl was a pirate movie with fantasy elements, and all its sequels are fantasy movies with pirate elements. It’s not unrelated that Black Pearl is still pretty kickass, and the other ones suck barnacles. If the Pirates franchise truly wanted to be revived with Dead Men Tell No Tales, or at least redeemed, the producers and writers would’ve realized that. The fact that they didn’t indicates they were really just in it for the cash.

What’s tough about Pirates 2-5 is that the enjoyment threshold of these movies really isn’t that high. They’re pirate movies. We want to like pirate movies. The lawlessness and the rebellion and the infinity of the sea—it’s a genre and world that offers a ton of backdrop for drama and adventure. But man, the Pirates movies can’t even clear the hurdle of “fine,” and it’s probably because, at the end of the day, they aren’t really pirate movies at all. If they took a more straightforward approach to their genre, they’d be better, so to fix that, we’ll turn to pirate-adjacent movies and take some notes.

Step One: Treat Master and Commander as Your Template
There’s a short checklist of things we want in a Pirates movie: 1) Action that can be described with the word “swashbuckling,” 2) exciting ship-on-ship battle scenes, 3) dashing heroes squaring off against dastardly villains. Sprinkle some comic relief on top and a swooshing score and you have a pretty good afternoon at the movies. Now, one movie out there already has all these things. It came out in 2003 and is called Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany are in it, and it’s about a British ship fighting a French ship during the Napoleonic Wars. The entire movie is essentially an oceanic cat-and-mouse chase, with ambushes, escapes, tricks, and strategies the whole way through. It’s fantastic. Watching Jack Sparrow and the bootleg turn in Pirates 5 isa bit reminiscent of the tactics employed throughout Master and Commander, and it makes you wish for a Pirates movie that cared more about the military intelligence that goes into captaining a ship. Plus, a storyline that showcases the nautical prowess of Jack Sparrow and Co. gives us room as audience members to take them more seriously as characters. Was there any reason to believe Johnny Depp could sail a ship at all?

Step Two: Enter the Brig
In 1981, Germany released a movie called Das Boot, often considered one of the great war movies of all time. Das Boot is about a U-boat in World War II, and it’s applauded mostly for its humanizing depiction of the submarine’s crew members, which lends greater stakes and emotion to the more sparing action sequences. A lot of the movie is made up of claustrophobic scenes of the crew cramped together in the sub, talking and strategizing and dealing with the confines of their mission. The lesson here is to shrink the scope. Every Pirates movie feels the need to go bigger than the last, usually in service of some fanciful legend, but Das Boot is a good example of how a seagoing movie can succeed when it goes small, even if the context around the story—WWII in this case—is enormous. There’s still room for myth, too. One of the great side plots in Master and Commander sees a member of the crew stamped as a Jonah, a figure who brings bad luck to seafaring vessels. There’s a jolting payoff here that won’t be spoiled, but the grounded approach is indicative of the Pirates fallacy that this sort of superstition always needed to be cranked to 11.

Step Three: Balance the Characters
Captain Phillips is a better movie than its title suggests. Really, it’s a thriller, and one of its many triumphs is how it lets itself cook to a cyclical boiling point (the ending, one of the best since 2010, is the premiere example of this). The movie’s most valuable player, aside from an underrated Tom Hanks, is Barkhad Abdi, otherwise known as the “I’m the captain now” guy. Hanks is your steady flow of Aleve, but Abdi is Vicodin. He just messes you up. Phillips is smart though because it treats him like a tasting menu instead of an all-you-can-eat buffet. It gives you just enough to crave more. Contrast that with Johnny Depp in Pirates. He’s shooting his shot in Black Pearl, but still willing to pass to teammates, while from the second movie to now he’s been hogging the ball and slashing the lane and flailing like a maniac under the basket. It’s really awful. The guy who helped prop up a solid first movie wrestled the mic toward himself and from there on out, the franchise was worse for it. Pirates was at its best when Jack Sparrow was stumbling along behind the scenes, not when he was parroting around in front of the cameras.

Most movies are better than Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, but fewer franchises in Hollywood had a higher ceiling than Pirates at large. If these flicks had cast an eye on Commander, Boot, or Phillips instead of Johnny Depp, we might have been given a genuinely interesting and unique series, one that honored the figures of its title. Instead, we have movies where we watch a bunch of people dress in too-elaborate costumes and play pretend at piracy. The only thing those seadogs can steal is more of our money.