Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)

The fourth and hopefully final film in the popular Disney franchise is here! Johnny Depp reprises his Oscar-nominated role as Captain Jack Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush returns as Barbossa. Single-handedly filling the shoes of the rest of the missing cast is series newcomer Penelope Cruz. They are off to find the Fountain of Youth because the evil Blackbeard wants to live forever and because Barbossa wants to kill Blackbeard. On the way there is lots of sword-fighting, scenery-chewing, dramatic music, and sobbing mermaids. I smell a hit.

The Pirates series has always been a crowd-pleaser. The combination of Jerry Bruckheimer's good action sense and Johnny Depp's excellent comic timing have made the movies successful and more than a little entertaining. The fourth installment, however, arrives with some problems in tow. Firstly, this movie came way too late. The series has more or less lost its primary fan base who have moved on to finer, or at least different, things. Those many people who do see this film will almost certainly come out disappointed. The whole adventure is so bland in nature that it winds up being underwhelming. The second issue builds off of the first one. This is an action movie second and a solemn drama first, which would work out well in many other cases, but certainly not in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. When you expect an action movie and the action is either minimal or extremely uninteresting, the movie has not served its purpose.

I think the primary issue is in the decision to bring in new director Rob Marshall. You can sense the change in style and mood from the beginning through to the end. This is the man whose other cinematic offerings have been Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Nine (hence the presence of Cruz). It is no wonder then that this too is leaking with theatricality. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but once again, it would have worked better elsewhere. This brings about one of the more interesting parts of the movie in the heavy reliance on music, though most audience members probably won't notice it. Most movies of this sort use music as background noise, relatively separate from the action on the screen. Here, music brings life to scenes that in this case would not have had much otherwise. The action sequences are carefully choreographed like a musical number, and I was reminded of Face/Off director John Woo, who once pointed out that there is no difference between the two.

On Stranger Tides is in no way a bad movie. There is enough here to keep everyone occupied until the close, but it doesn't have any of the oomph that its predecessors had and is without question the weakest entry in the franchise. Fans of the series and families looking for relatively innocent fare will enjoy this for a brief period, but I wouldn't recommend more than a rental.

6/10