Jared Camire

A jumbled mess that kept me more confused about the direction it was taking than developing a fun narrative. Want a splash of Indiana Jones? Well it's WWI so we can't use Nazi's, so let's put in an awful clichè and terribly acted Kaisery World domination villain/"plot" line. The Macguffin here is a plant that fixes anything and somehow gurantees eternal life. You can see where this goes between vague threats, bad guy deals, captured allies, etc... Are you bored yet? Want some Pirates of the Caribbean? Unexplainable yet somehow repetitive ghost story that fails to do anything but provide some vague paranormal threat to tie into the protagonists history. There's no Jack Sparrow here though, no Will and Elizabeth, no Barbossa, no charm or oneupsmanship in any of the characters who seem to be briefly mildly annoyed with each other instead of having competing agendas to drive the tension. In fact, the film has no tension at all despite the obvious attempts to recreate the Pirates formula. Want humor? It's sparser than the source material promised. Puns are mostly missable and entirely secondary to the scripts attempts to make you care about plot exposition that boil down to "Somehow Palpatine returned." While bad CGI and bland set pieces zap your interest in trying to find Easter eggs, the film is focuses on giving you awful transitions between boring stunts that don't seem to connect to one another before invalidating every event that precedes it with a "shocking" "twist" that provides no substance to the narrative except to make you realize the previous reels of the film were essentially worthless. Spoiler: Why are our characters getting knocked out with blowdarts if at least one of them knows it's not real? Johnson and Blunt stroll through the jungle cruise without chemistry while comic relief relative provides nothing but a completely forced and unmanaged woke background that the film exploits without exploring. The epitome of bad writing and forced, artificial deadlines producing inferior products in hollywood. Disney is on a downward spiral of this is the future of their filmmaking, which it feels like it is.