Jon Reviews POTC: On Stranger Tides

Alas, the movie everyone has been waiting for or forgot was coming out all together.

The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out recently and seemed to have come out of nowhere. Most people I asked thought it was the third movie in the series. That could be in reference to the forgettableness of the third movie, or in reference to the “amazing” story arc spanning the second and third movies. My bets are on the former though, seeing as the third movie was vague and confusing most of the time.

But this is no review of At World’s End. This is a review for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

Warning: This review might be vaguely spoilerish, but not too spoilerish.

If I had to sum this movie up in a single word, it would be forgettable. There are many things wrong with this movie, but there are also plenty of good.

The movie starts out with Jack trying to release Gibbs from a death sentence. You remember Gibbs, right? Muttonchops Johnson? The rotund fellow who follows Jack around all the time no matter what insane thing he does? Yeah, that guy. Well things pick up and they dont stop picking up. Every few minutes the movie halts any practical storyline it has going to pull off some ridiculous action sequence. In the first few minutes there’s a buggy chase, a fight, a foot-chase and a gun fight, and within those 10 minutes or so they managed to yell a few key words to keep the plot going.

As pointed out at the end of the third movie, Jack has a map to The Fountain of Youth. The map gets stolen in the first few minutes and plays practically no part in the movie. If anything the writers only put it in to remind the audience that this movie is in any way connected to the other three movies.

Some of the buzzwords yelled in the first few minutes are “Fountain”, “Jack Sparrow!”, “Blackbeard..!” and “Penelope Cruz”..I’m sure I heard the last one in there somewhere.

Once those key words are established, the movie barely tries to keep with the plot and decides instead that characters can be developed by simply doing goofy things around Jack. I’m not even joking when I tell you that pretty much every character ONLY develops whilst around Jack. Sure there are scenes without him, maybe one… or two… but those scenes do nothing to drive the other characters forward, they just spout off more of the same stuff we heard earlier while Jack was juggling two bananas while playing a ukulele.

Now that we have established that none of the new characters do anything new unless Jack is around, let’s see how they did otherwise.

Penelope Cruz does as good a job possible within the constantly rushing script. It becomes clear that her character is sort of a badass, but she loves God, but she also totally wants to get revenge on Jack Sparrow, but she is also probably in love with him, but she also sort of maybe practices voodoo. She plays Blackbeard’s long lost daughter, though it’s never told how she or he found out they were related, let’s just assume that her mom was on her deathbed and said something like “I’m dying, so I ought to tell you that your dad is a totally badass pirate who is thought to be pure evil in every way.” Now with that being said, wouldn’t you think that Angelica (Penelope Cruz) would think “Well wow, good thing I know, maybe I should just stick to what I’m doing. I don’t want to get stabbed or something by this evil fellow.” No, instead she decides that it will apparently be her lifelong goal to save his soul, but as stated before, she’s not really a model-christian.

This leads us to Blackbeard. The most DREADED PIRATE EVER! My problem with being called the most dreaded pirate ever (unless you are Dread Pirate Roberts), is that there always seems to be a “most dreaded pirate ever” in each Pirates of the Caribbean movie. First one: Barbossa, even after we got to know him he was quite terrifying and badass. Second: Davy Jones, how can you go wrong with Bill Nighy AND a claw hand? You can not.

You can unfortunately go wrong when you introduce a pirate who is also the most dreaded ever, and barely explain anything about him, and only show that he is evil by everyone elses expressions. I’ll admit it, for the first two minutes when they show Blackbeard standing there looking pissed off, he totally looks badass and scary. Then like a minute later he’s in his chambers, relaxing and looking like a puttering old man who lost his will to pillage. For shame Blackbeard! We soon find out that has been told by someone that he’s going to die soon, so he starts looking for The Fountain of Youth. This makes sense, but it doesn’t make for a good villain. Imagine if Heath Ledger’s Joker had cancer, and the real reason he was being unruly was because he was distraught about his tumor. That would be lame and nobody would buy it.

Well I didn’t buy it in this movie either. It’s clear very early on that Blackbeard does NOT want his eternal soul saved for heaven, nor does he ever really act like that is what he wants. All he wants is to kill people and move things around with magic. Just as any man would want.

But here is the problem with that, Ian McShane played the character as I stated above, totally badass and murdery to the last bit. The script seemed to want him to be more of a puttering old man who might maybe want to give God a chance, if God will take him! This mismatching causes some major character dilemmas. In one scene Blackbeard burns a guy alive, then in the next he is slouching in his chambers looking pathetic, but in another scene he is threatening to kill his daughter because he’s cool like that. All together, Ian McShane does a great job at playing a guy who could slit your throat at any second, but the script tries to tell you that he would regret it afterwards, and if you see McShane in this movie, he looks like he’d enjoy it instead of regret it any day.

Then we come to Barbossa. Ah yes, Captain Barbossa. Well.. umm… Geoffrey Rush plays him again. He looks a bit worse, and his face seems to be shedding like a snake would. Oh, he has a peg leg now! Other than that, its Barbossa as he was in the first Pirates movie. An asshole who knows it and couldn’t care less. Much better than the Barbossa from the third movie, who thought it was an awesome idea to marry Will and Elizabeth while murdering the King’s men. For shame, Hector.

Now I could go on about Jack and how his character grew and this and that, but he didn’t. Not really. Jack is the same lovable archetype we saw from the last three movies. Luckily this time they didn’t have him talking to 30 versions of himself at all, which was a relief. But other than that he was already well established in the other three movies, so all he tends to do is drive the plot forward instead of develop into something more than what we have already seen.

As I have said, the plot was vague at best and brief. The movie decided to push the plot forward with swords rather than words. So if you are in the mood for a movie that will have lots of loud moments with explosions and some death-dealing, go see Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. But if you want to see a well-written movie about pirates, go watch the first one again.