#47 PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN 5: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES

Starring Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Kevin McNally and Geoffrey Rush and Paul McCartney. Written by Jeff Nathanson. Directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg. Budget $230 million! Running time 129 minutes. Certificate 12a

Hateful sac of shit, tied up with string and run over by a truck carrying liquid shit to a vomiting convention.

This is the fifth of these stupid, bloated cinematic equivalents of an all-you-can-eat-buffet. The first one, as I remember was a delight, so different and packed with great ideas and freshness, after that the series rapidly started floundering and by the last one I think we all signed a collective sigh of relief that we'd seen the last of Captain Jack Sparrow.

But sadly not. Cos here comes the fifth attempt to squeeze yet more money out of the corpse of a  creatively dead franchise. Johnny Depp is Captain Jack Sparrow, Javier Bardem is Salazar, the cursed baddy, Brenton Thwaites is the son of Orlando Blooms cursed character and Kaya Scodelario is a female astronomer, looking for her father and Geoffrey Rush is Captain thingie and they're all looking for the mythical Trident of Poseidon, which can break any curse. That's the plot, in a nutshell.

What follows is a dull, plod where characters are introduced to either progress the plot along or die, so the regular ones don't. For example, we're introduced to an interesting tattooed witch who then disappears never to be mentioned or seen again. And all the while Johnny Depp shows us what a fantastic actor he is by pretending to be drunk in every scene. And the awesome power of the CGI pixels are spewed across the screen in wave after wave of bloated excess, cos, as Hollywood knows, as long as the effects are special we don't care about anything else. And if you find the Fast and Furious franchise a little fast and easy with the laws of physics you ain't seen nothing yet. This film has so many logical holes it's infuriating! Can anyone explain how the pirates manage to lift a one tonne safe onto their ship - for example. Or, for that matter, why anyone would think that buildings when they are built can be ripped away from their foundations and dragged by horses through the streets?

Dead men Tell No Tales is a staggering banal film saved only by the superb special effects on Javier Bardem and the zombie sharks.

And that's it. I hated this film and hope I never see it again.

2/10