Curse crossed

Best-selling fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson famously said that the first law of any story that involves the paranormal is that the author’s ability to solve a conflict with magic must be directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, The Curse of the Black Pearl, executed this rule perfectly.

A group of pirates are cursed to live as the walking dead after stealing 882 pieces of Aztec gold. To lift the curse, they must retrieve the single piece that was lost, along with a drop of blood in restitution from the line of the man who stole it. The rest of the story—the brilliant set pieces, the sword fights, the romance, even the inspired loopiness of Johnny Depp’s beloved Captain Jack Sparrow—were all swirling bits of realistic color around this central supernatural conflict. The audience understood it and understood the stakes. The movie was the biggest hit of the summer of 2003, as it deserved to be.

Fast-forward 14 years and four films later, and Sanderson’s law has been completely blown out of the water. Perhaps there are some devoted fans who will remember every bit of sorcery that’s accumulated over the course of this franchise and now floats like so much jetsam around the new Dead Men Tell No Tales. But nobody I spoke to at my press screening was one of them. The tentacles of all the past magic, combined with the addition of some new talisman called Poseidon’s Trident, strangle the sense from an otherwise passable popcorn flick.

Don’t even pause to guess what Poseidon’s Trident actually is or where it came from or why it has the power to break all the curses on the ocean. You won’t have time while you’re trying to remember what exactly Jack’s magic compass does or why we should care when he hits rock bottom and trades it for a bottle of rum. Besides, you’ll need every spare second to whisper to your neighbor: Wait, how did that Spanish navy captain and his crew get cursed? Because they sailed into that one cove? But then why doesn’t everybody who goes in there become a half-disintegrated zombie? I don’t get it.

You may get how the Black Pearl ended up shrunken to the size of toy boat and stuck in a bottle. That one sailed past me, but I’ve heard tell there are other souls that still recall the tale. I do recollect something about Davy Jones’ locker and some other undead curse (the Seven Seas are positively teeming with curses that leave men undead, don’tcha know), but I don’t remember how Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner got stuck in it, his handsome face ruined by barnacles.

Still, it’s nice that his now-grown son Henry (Brenton Thwaites) is so determined to rescue him. Though it’s completely unclear why he needs Jack Sparrow to do it since the magic ruby that can unlock the secret map of the stars is being held by a poor, innocent girl on trial for being a witch (as opposed to the not-so-poor, not-so-innocent actual witch assisting Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbossa).

The plotting, as you may have guessed, is as overstuffed as the magic. Any one of the major threads the script follows would have made a great movie. How a decrepit Jack Sparrow regains his youthful significance and swagger. How Henry Turner rescues his father from an eternal death sentence at the bottom of the ocean. How a scientifically gifted orphan girl beats a witch rap, finds her family, and becomes the toast of pirates throughout the Caribbean. I would pay good money to see any one of those movies. But not all of them mashed together. That mess—despite a few clever gags, the always-stunning visuals, and, yes, some very cool ghost sharks—I’m glad I got to see for free.