When will I ever learn?

Oh, Pirates of the Caribbean, I have given you every chance down the years. Every chance. I am always hopeful. This may be the one that has a proper story I can follow, I have told myself. This may be the one in which Johnny Depp even bothers to act, I have told myself. This may be the one that doesn’t make me wish I’d stayed home where I could be doing something more interesting and fulfilling, like sorting laundry or cleaning out the fridge. When will I ever learn? When?

Pirates, you’re on film five now, and I don’t understand. Well, I do and I don’t. You’re one of those blockbuster franchises that certain audiences will wish to see regardless, as perplexing as that is. But does this mean you don’t even have to try to make it any good? Make any effort at all? With your $230 million budget you couldn’t, for example, have somehow discovered a proper function for Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, who now truck up merely because it’s expected they will do so? You couldn’t have come up with a better script, one that doesn’t include: ‘I’m sorry, Jack, we’ve reached the end of our horizon.’ What does that even mean? You couldn’t have devised a decent narrative such that, when the ‘trident of Poseidon’ is finally found, we could remember why it was required in the first instance? The fact is, Pirates, you are so insultingly lazy it’s a wonder anyone puts up with you at all. If you were a person, I’d have thrown you out the house years ago.

This time, you open with a prologue that has Bloom truck up with a face that seems to have been colonised by barnacles, like some terrible scrofula.