Available for home viewing: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales ½★

This review will be short and dismissive. The movie under consideration — Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales — is, by contrasts, long and punishing. Its pleasures are so meager, its delight in its own inventions so forced and false, that it becomes almost the perfect opposite of entertainment. To insist otherwise is a variation on the sunk cost fallacy. Since you exchanged money for fun, fun is surely what you must have purchased, and you may cling to that idea in the face of contrary evidence. But trust me on this: This movie would be a rip-off even if someone paid you to see it.

Because, to be honest, it’s barely a movie at all. The first installments of the Pirates franchise conquered skepticism with exuberance and charm. Somehow, a theme-park ride combined with clever, madcap visuals and Johnny Depp’s scapegrace showboating added up to something fresh. But that spirit is long gone. Depp, as Capt. Jack Sparrow, goes through the motions like a washed-up rock star reprising his greatest hits in a half-empty auditorium. The images are so dark and muddy that you can’t see what’s going on well enough to know why you don’t care. The plot twists, Easter eggs and surprises are either obvious or labored. You can’t spoil something that’s already thoroughly rotten.

Now and then you get a reminder of why you might have enjoyed the earlier movies. There are a couple of nifty Rube Goldbergian action sequences — one with a bank vault, the other with a guillotine — that recall the berserk inventiveness of Gore Verbinski, the original director. But otherwise, Dead Men Tell No Tales, directed by Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg from a script by Jeff Nathanson, is a tedious rehash.

Two appealing young people (Kaya Scodelario and Brenton Thwaites) meet on a quest for a mysterious and powerful object. They are joined by Sparrow and pursued by old and new enemies: the British Navy; the greedy pirate Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush); and an army of ghouls led by the spectral Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem), known as the butcher of the sea.

This goes on for more than two hours. You are invited to sit through every last name on the lengthy end credits for a teasing extra scene of a couple asleep on linen sheets, a reminder of how you might have better spent the time. It would be a spoiler to identify those bedfellows, but the bigger spoiler is that apparently another sequel is on the way.