Review: Pirates of the Caribbean - Salazar's Revenge

Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge / Dead Men Tell No Tales (2D)
Cert: 12A / 129 mins / Dir. Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg / Trailer



Now the main thing to bear in mind for the duration of this review is, Salazar's Revenge*¹ wasn't going to be 'for' me. And I'm fine with that. I've never really found Disney's PotC series any more than quite good at best, and my recent live-tweeting of installments one-to-four was knocked on the head after the first two, as I was becoming bogged down by the rapid succession of the things I didn't like about them.

So, we're now approximately nineteen years down the line from the end of At World's End, and young Henry Turner (Brendon Thwaites) thinks he's figured out a way to free his father Will (Orlando Bloom) from his 'Being The Captain Of The Flying Dutchman' curse. This will involve tracking down Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Meanwhile elsewhere, young scientist and scholar Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario) is on the verge of being executed by her townsfolk for witchcraft, and is determined to discover the identity of her long-lost father. This will involve a chance meeting with Jack Sparrow (Spoiler: he's not her dad). Old faces from movies past return for the outing (although there are more than a few notable by their absence), and despite having a superb villain in the form of Javier Bardem's Salazar (think: a livid, Spanish Darth Vader), the inevitable violence is kept within 12A-certificate levels. For a family thrill-ride, you could do a lot worse.

I just didn't find the finished product particularly interesting. And it's not as if there's an absence of plot mechanics or pacing issues slow that plot down at all; action set-pieces are delivered, swashes are buckled and timbers are shivered with watch-setting regularity. I just couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen all of this before, and barely even in a different order.

Outside of the aforementioned scene-stealing by Sr. Bardem, Kaya Scodelario, Brendan Thwaites and Geoffrey Rush are all aching for a better screenplay, their obvious talent largely wasted. But I may as well join the choir in saying that the real problem here is Johnny Depp, not even mustering his usual lacklustre levels of performance. By this point, Jack Sparrow*² feels like he should be an incidental character in 'Allo 'Allo, wheeled out once a week with his worn-out schtick in the hope that audience-familiarity will be enough to pad over the gaps in the script. It won't. If anything, the one-note seafarer is just getting in the way now, the very agent holding the series back rather than pushing it boldly forward. Ironically, the character has become more of an anchor than Disney ever intended.

All that said, I don't feel able to lay out the beating that many critics are currently getting off their chests, if only because I don't feel the film's put in enough effort to really warrant one. There are good things in PotC5, but nowhere near enough of them and for nowhere near as long as they need to be.

However, it's also important to note that I actually fell asleep during the multi-million dollar, climactic battle of Salazar's Revenge. I mean only to the point where I jolted myself awake, but still. What can I tell you? By that point I was all out of fucks to give, and the murky*³, fast-cut action/mayhem shaky-cam, coupled with what can only be described as overwhelming symphony of grey-noise from the orchestra, audio-effects department and indeed the cast, basically just said to my brain 'you can't actually concentrate on any of what's meant to be happening here. Just sleep and pick it all up from the ending you know is in the post anyway'.

And with the exception of Bardem, the after-credits sequence made me happier than anything in the preceding one hundred and twenty eight minutes.

The other PotC films.



Only if you like watching the same thing again but bigger and louder.



I have no idea.



Going to go out on a limb here and say no.



Probably not. But you'll have to explain yourself.



There is.



Level 1: Sabé and Tion Medon are in this.





*¹ No you're right, Ian Disney, giving a different episode-title just for the UK release makes absolute sense. I'm assuming this is so you can tell how many cam-jobs are originating from our shores, given that it's not like "Dead Men Tell No Tales" is a phrase us Brits would look at and think 'hey hang on, how is that pirate-related?'. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Sorry, 'Captain' Jack Sparrow. Hahaha, yeah, that never gets old… ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ And given that the final half hour is way too dark (visually) in 2D, my heart goes out to the poor saps who watched this in 3D and had to put up with the associated light-loss… ^{[ BACK ]}


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Lion

Lion
Cert: PG / 118 mins / Dir. Garth Davis / Trailer



Talk about an achilles-heel. In order to sell the cinematic adaptation of Saroo Brierley's remarkable life (in which he's separated as a five-year old from his family in poverty-stricken Khandwa, India, lives for several months 1600km away on the streets of Kolkata before being taken in by an orphanage then moved to Austrialia for adoption, then over twenty years later manages to track down his birth-mother by means of persistence, luck and Google Earth), the trailer has to focus on the English-language part of the film starring Dev Patel. In doing so, the trailer communicates absolutely nothing of what makes the story special.

The first half (roughly) of Garth Davis' film is set in India and follows Saroo as a young boy, showing how he came to be lost and the path of utter uncertainty which led to him being chosen for a new life in Tasmania. The first half of the film features a young actor named Sunny Pawar as Saroo. The first half of the film is compelling, enthralling and utterly heartbreaking. To say that Pawar is good would be an understatement. Even as child-actors go, I haven't seen a performance this strong since Jacob Tremblay in Room. When you also factor in that the majority of Sunny's scenes are either with one other actor or on his own, plus the subtitled nature of this half of the film meaning that his acting is almost entirely physical (from an English-speaking audience's point-of-view), I'd go as far as saying his is the best performance I've seen this year, hands-down. He strikes the perfect chord as being a child who's clearly highly intelligent, but almost completely uneducated (formally). He has the wits to survive as a stranger on the other side of an unbelievably harsh country, but doesn't know where he's from in order to try and get back there (although to be fair, how many five-year olds would?).

Things start getting a little more heavy-handed once Saroo is settled in Oz and we get a '20 years later' card, and by the time the story's skipped forward another twelve months, the Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman, Rooney Mara & David Wenham family drama has turned into a mawkish, over-acted soap-opera where the only performer who can do the story justice is Patel himself. And he's good, but he has so much to carry that I quickly lost interest and empathy with the story. However, when Saroo finally tracks down his old hometown on Google Earth, I did get a tingle (this is a true story, these aren't spoilers). And when he's finally reunited with his birth-mother, I did get a warm glow. And when the denouement of the film shows the real-life-actual Saroo with his real-life-actual mother Kamla, I did have something in my eye, a bit. And this is the only film in living memory where I can say that the transition to the story's real-life counterparts is welcome. Sully, take note.

Lion is good.
Dev Patel is very good.
Sunny Pawar is outstanding.

And with this exception of Dev, do your best to ignore the English-speaking cast…

Well, it's a bit Hundred-Foot Journey in places.
For the right and wrong reasons.



Not especially.
That said (and this isn't just because of the answer to question 7), some of the photography in the film is absolutely outstanding.



It does, but in spite of its best efforts not to.



It's Sunny Pawar's first movie, but he's set his own bar high.
For everyone else? No.



Nah.



There isn't.



Level 1: The director of photography for Lion is a Mr Grieg Fraser, who coincidentally performs the same role for Rogue One.







DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.