The new ‘Pirates’: Some dead things can’t be resurrected

There are dead people wanting to come back to life in Pirates of the Caribbean: [...] a director trying to pump air and passion into a stinking corpse of a franchise. [...] sitting in a theater fighting restless leg syndrome is more than a waste of time; it’s actively unpleasant. [...] is being seized by a fatigue so sudden that you sit there half-expecting a gastroenterologist to walk in and ask you to count backwards from 10. The ensuing scene between father and son has elements the rest of the movie lacks. Young Henry resolves to break the curse and rescue his father, and that alone — just that story element — would be quite enough to propel a decent adventure movie. Next thing we know, it’s years later and Henry (Brenton Thwaites) is all grown up, and, alas, puberty seems to have robbed the promising lad of his acting ability. The British government also wants to kill a young astronomer (Kaya Scodelario) on a false charge of witchcraft. [...] there’s an undead sea captain (Javier Bardem) who wants to kill Captain Jack. For slow, dull action scenes he scores loud, propulsive music to make the audience think it’s seeing something that isn’t there. We get the horns of profundity and the strings of sincerity, not to mention the soaring choruses that tell us that grand things are really happening now, oh boy — and that these people are really feeling something — and aren’t we privileged to be swept away on this epic of joy and adventure? . . . A cannonball hits the platform and causes the guillotine to revolve and revolve, so that the blade keeps almost touching his neck but then is thrust back through the centrifugal force.