Oh dear, landlubbers, thar she blows.
It becomes blatantly apparent from the beginning of Rob Marshall’s bloated mess Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides that this film has been scraping the bottom of the poop deck to cash in on the residual goodwill of audiences to modern cinema’s favourite corsair. Treading water after two already unwelcome sequels to a surprise critical hit that turned Johnny Depp into a box-office behemoth back in 2003, On Stranger Tides suffers from the basic misunderstanding of the entertainment tenet: leave them wanting more. Little chance of that happening with a swollen 136-minute runtime, redundant 3D rendering and more unnecessary character threads than a Cat o’ Nine Tails.
This time round, rascal of the seven seas Captain Jack Sparrow is inexplicably on the quest for the mythical Fountain of Youth, after former flame and feisty Latina lover Angelica, played as an irritable Iberian stereotype by Penélope Cruz, offers to help him reclaim his beloved ship, the Black Pearl. Of course, they’ll first have to beat the Spanish navy’s mission to reach said font first, in order to destroy it and save all that is pure in Christendom from the power to rival God’s divine mastery of mortality. Oh, and they’ll have to best Ian McShane’s Blackbeard, the most dreaded pirate on the oceans, at least since that last most dreaded one Capn’ Jack pissed off in the last movie. And… then there’s also the other relic of the first three flicks, Sparrow’s rival Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), who’s now working for King George II and in command of a Royal Navy frigate – he’s there too, dowsing rod whipped out. Oh, and there’s another subplot involving a missionary and mermaid as well, for good measure, in case the friggin’ feisty-fountain-fiend-frigate fandango wasn’t enough.
No one comes out of this mess well, with the biggest offender being Captain Jack himself. Once the cool trippy uncle of the extended film family, Sparrow is now a lame duck, spouting nonsense jokes and stripped of any dark edge that Gore Verbinski’s much better original film offered. Earlier in the series, there was at least an understanding that Jack was a pirate, a man who makes his living plundering from shore to shore, by any means, and who’d cut your throat to save his skin. Now we have a neutered Jack who makes innuendo puns and looks like he walked in from the set of Carry on… Up Your Jolly Roger.
With such a jam-packed plot, the rest of the characters have to do as best they can with whatever moments of screen time available, and those making their debut suffer most. Ian McShane, becoming something of Hollywood’s go-to gruff British villain, finds little to love in a joyless one-note baddie, whose bag o’ tricks ship is more interesting than its captain. Cruz just offers cringe worthy snippets of salty dialogue (“How is it we can never meet without you pointing something at me?!”) or babbles in hot-tempered Spanish while readying for some flamenco in the bullring. Worst of all are the star-crossed lovers, Philip and Syrena, whose development as 2011’s inter-species significant others is so laughable in its execution, they may as well have shown them playing footsie-finsie watching The Little Mermaid on DVD.
Marshall, the director behind such stagey features such as Chicago, Nine and Memoirs of a Geisha, does have occasional moments of visual creativity (gravity defying drops of water come to mind), and the action scenes, while largely forgettable, offer at least one burst of energy with the attack of the mermaids. But the film doesn’t understand what it’s trying to be or who its star is; Jack Sparrow was the supporting character to Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley’s straitlaced leads. Having taken away those who drove the plot, Marshall’s film relies solely on the audience looking at a bunch of stars to navigate his film, and not even one as bright as Johnny Depp can steer his ship from off the rocks.
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