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.
