Kaya Scodelario, Johnny Depp, and Brandon Thwaites (Walt Disney Studios)

Captain Hector Barbosa (Geoffrey Rush) gets the best line in Pirates of the Caribbean:Dead Men Tell No Tales, the fifth installment in one of the most lucrative franchises in cinema. It’s two words: “My treasure.” On the surface, it’s the typical pirate’s booty, the elusive payoff these sea-salted outlaws all seek, but in this context, it’s about something far more valuable: family.

Unfortunately, it takes two tedious hours to get to this, dare I say, moving juncture. And much of that time is spent with Johnny Depp drunk.

The marquee star isn’t necessary to the plot, really, other than as a stepping stone to real treasure. The filmmakers seem to be aware of this. Depp makes his first appearance in a bank vault that his friends are about to whisk away in an expensive, ambitious set piece that yields an a near-empty payoff, and the whole escapade seems to be a not-so-thinly veiled escapade designed to get rid of Captain Jack Sparrow.

The movie’s real quests are filial, its two young leads both searching for a connection to their father. Henry (the nondescript Brenton Thwaites) hopes to rescue his father (Orlando Bloom) from a pirate’s curse; Carina (an appealing Kaya Scodelario) hopes to honor her departed father’s memory to by following the celestial map he left behind.

So this multimillion dollar seafaring adventure has grand themes and echoes of classic literature: Shakespeare, Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson; these are the authors whose rich characters and vivid language is sorely missing in this tedious would-be-action movie.

Spending 129 minutes on an amusement park ride would probably elicit more thrills and character development than this movie, but it’s not completely hopeless. In this cinematic delicatessen display, you can choose your variety of ham: leading man Johnny Depp, his frequently inebriated outlaw quickly morphing into his generation’s Foster Brooks; the supporting ham Geoffrey Rush, who gets to have the film’s most tender moment; or the villainous ham of Javier Bardem.

Until the film’s climax, directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (Kon Tiki) don’t make much out of the movie’s unending series of set pieces, adventures by land and by sea for the most part unengaging (a minor exception being the sight of Depp swinging around in a guillotine). If you’ve come to look for a Beatle, blink and you’ll miss Paul McCartney’s brief cameo.

If that’s not enough for you, there’s a post-credits stinger, promising yet another installment. One hopes that if they go that far, a future episode 20 years from now will revolve around a drunken actor wandering into an ancient, abandoned amusement park ride where distinguished actors well past the end of their working careers can be found chewing scenery in broken-down animatronic shells. It would be called Pirates of the Caribbean: That’s Not My Peg-Leg!, and it would send off the franchise on an autumnal note. Someday.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg
Written by Jeff Nathanson
With Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Javier Bardem
Rated PG-13 for sequences of adventure violence, mildly suggestive content, and a monkey
129 minutes.
Opens today at a multiplex near you.