Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Loses That Loving Feeling

C: We can surmise Johnny Depp was handed the hat, saw ocean, and gave it a whirl.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is a pretty good example of a creative team knowing all the requisite dance steps … but then completely missing the motivation and spirit of the dance itself. The cast and crew are game, but Captain Jack Sparrow has been neutered, and all the action scenes in the world can’t make up for that lost sense of mirth that infused previous Pirates efforts. It’s by no means a bad movie, but viewed through the prism of context and expectations, it’s not a good movie either.

We start our tale at a trial for First Mate Gibbs. He’s to be convicted by a London tribunal, but even worse he’s to be convicted of being the notorious pirate named Jack Sparrow! Luckily for Gibbs’s sensitive and unbroken neck the notorious pirate intercedes on his behalf, they achieve blessed escape, and the patented “Duh Duh, Duh Duh, da da, Duh Duh Duh” Pirates theme arrives on the scene. The fellas are being chased! Sword fights, British soldiers running into each other, a desperate move by Sparrow that proves ingenious and filled with hilarity! There’s a hope that this somewhat promising open will lead to a fruitful film. Wrong.

Enter Penelope Cruz, because the script calls for her to enter, and I’m guessing she was contractually and financially obligated to do so. An entire backstory is hinted at, one where Sparrow loved this woman, but tossed her and left her, when she’d have rather he stayed and played. Now she’s first mate on a ship set to chase after The Fountain of Youth, an enterprise Jack Sparrow wheedled his way out of with Captain Barbosa. After meeting (and fighting) Cruz, Jack is rendered unconscious, and four days later he’s serving as a mate on Blackbeard’s ship. They must find mermaids, to get a tear from one, to utilize Ponce de Leon’s silver chalices, to draw water from The Fountain, to reverse the course of aging. If all of this sounds incredibly convoluted it’s because it is. Eventually, around an hour in, you’ll start to accept that the main characters are heading somewhere, in the face of remarkable danger, because they say so.

Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow has always been a callous and manipulative anti-hero with a five percent nod toward honor. Not so for this version. They’ve ratcheted up the honor portion, because the story doesn’t have enough going on to survive otherwise. Major action beats come along every ten minutes, but they begin to all feel the same because you know as well as the film does where the culmination will come, and it won’t be on stranger tides. Sparrow’s single-minded protection of Penelope Cruz’s Angelica hurts the entertainment value, as does a preposterously thrown in new character, a missionary, who manages to fall in love with a vampire mermaid creature. Did I mention the zombies yet? Oh yes, there are zombies, voodoo dolls, and the occasional bout of magic, all in an effort to keep things moving. None of these items are explained or tied up, though there is a wordless end credits scene that involves one of them. The lone new character bright spot comes from Scrum, played by Stephen Graham. He doesn’t get much to do, but the goodwill he’s built up in projects like Boardwalk Empire and Snatch hold him in good stead.

Also impressive are the vampire mermaid effects. Though the 3-D is used sparingly, a few good examples come with the VampMers, a beautiful collection of aquatic sirens constructed to feast upon manflesh. Like the orcs, only far more shimmery. Astrid Berges-Frisbey plays a lead VampMer named Syrena, no complaints there, though the logic of the piece begins to come undone almost directly after he establishment of VampMers. Unfortunately the film sets up internal logic rules, only to break them, and not in a fun and silly way, but more in a “couldn’t quite make this element fit” sort of way.

To be fair, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides does have all the ingredients you’ve come to love from the Pirates franchise. That the ingredients are used improperly, and half baked, is simply an indictment on the creative team, not the principals. We can surmise Johnny Depp was handed the hat, saw the ocean, and gave it a whirl. That Sparrow was made predictable, killing the essence of Captain Jack, couldn’t have been foreseen. The original Pirates was a shining city upon a hill, but the fourth effort proves the magic is gone, replaced by scenes calculated to please the broadest amount of people. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, right up to the point where all that calculating leads to a product that’s formulaic.

Grade: C

Source: film.com

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