Ok so, here's my fan review.
I love the first movie, I love the second movie which I thought was one of the best adventure movie we've gotten in recent years, third one was a letdown but had some impressive setpieces, 4th one was a disaster.
5th one is...
A waste. A gigantic waste.
First of all, let me start by saying that the photography is pathetic, and that there is almost 0 impressive shot / scene / action sequence / set piece in the entire movie. There's like 1 if i'm generous.
That being said, it doesn't make a movie "bad" even though you'd expect Pirates to have this to make up for other potential shortcomings.
So we're left with the story, main plot, and the characters.
The main plot is absolutely awful, and full of convenience. Like "oh, so all the relevant characters end up at the same place at the exact same time, and this item somehow has magical powers that are never explained and interact with somebody that's super far just for the sake of moving the plot forward".
It's insanely cringe worthy how little effort is put into making this story logical and organic.
The other problem is that the heroes only have one goal. So instead of going on an adventure to pick up pieces or passing trials to reach their ultimate goal (like any good adventure movie), you.... end up watching them on the sea doing basically nothing for the whole movie. The only time they land on an island is for a 5 minutes joke sequence, which wasn't bad but what a letdown.
Ok so... the characters then ?
They look really good. Everybody looks great in the movie, they're all pretty, they have all aged well, the newcomers are beautiful.
Yeah that's all I have. They are extremely bland versions of Will and Elisabeth, the actors are okay, honestly nobody could have done better with this script.
Jack Sparrow : They do exactly what not to do. Instead of trying to show a different aspect of Jack and allowing the audience to breath a little from Depp (both character and actor) so that maybe we end up missing him, he is thrown in your face permanently with unfunny scenes. Not to Depp's fault, once again, the script. He does have a few cool and funny scenes overall, quantity over quality.
Everybody searches for him, AGAIN, he is responsible for everything in the world, he has people hating him wherever he goes, the problem is that the convenience issues I mentioned above makes the Jack situation insufferable.
Barbossa was alright. One big reveal hurt by convenience once again. (one chance in a million... except those happen 47 times in the same hour so you can only suspend your disbelief for so long)
Ok so now, THAT BEING SAID.
I sound really negative and really it's because I'm disappointed.
I still love the Pirates world. I still love the concept of the characters. At times, the movie really works and makes you wonder why they didn't write competently the whole time.
The reason the movie is disappointing is because it's creatively bankrupt. But that's the writers' fault. Let me write the movie and I guarantee it wouldn't have any of those problems. And I can't be the only writer that could do something great with the Pirates settings.
I feel like wrong guidance from Disney (this suffers from a lot of issues you can see in TFA, like trying to be a reboot/remake/sequel all at once and playing the same old beat, except it fails harder) and bad writers led to this.
ALL IN ALL, the movie leaves you in a place where... I feel like I wouldn't be against another movie, but it has to be good.
And they need to move away from Depp, even if they have him as last minute savior, this is fine, or have him as underdog with less screentime, anything but the constant focus on him. It's hurting the movies, it's hurting him (because we are all fed up at this time), etc...
SO, it's not an offensively bad movie, just except really bad "convenient" writing, if you can tolerate that, then it's pretty okay. A shame it doesn't have eye candy or mind blowing scenes like the previous Pirates.
I don't want this to die, because even if this one is disappointing, there really isn't anything quite like it out there.
They just need creative writers.