Film Review: Pirates Of The Carribean: On Stranger Tides

As inevitable as the tides (getting any form of nautical puns out of the way early), here comes the 4th installment of the adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow as Disney rolls out Pirates Of The Carribean: On Stranger Tides.

Loosely based on the 1987 novel 'On Stranger Tides', but replacing the books main character with Sparrow (Johnny Depp, returning again) in a race to reach the fountain of youth against Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush, also returning) and series newcomers Angelica (Penelope Cruz) and the fearsome Blackbeard (Ian McShane), encountering many dangers along the way like mermaids (scarier than they sound...just) and Blackbeards zombiefied crew.

Along with McShane and Cruz, the film also has a new director. Rob Marshall (Chicago, Nine) replacing Gore Verbiniski.

Gone now are the hyper annoying duo of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, replaced my preacher Phillip Swift (Sam Claflin) and good mermaid Syrena (Astrid Berges-Frisbey.) The latters character given that a name in one of the films more ridiculous moments ("That's not her name! It's erm...er..".)

Unfortunately the film is full of ridiculous moments, gaping plot holes, and just an air of pointlessness. It's great to see Depp and Rush back, for about ten minutes. After that it just feels like you're watching a re-run of one of the first three 'Pirates' movies.

Ian McShane is good as Blackbeard (and at times you think he is going to break out into full on Al Swearengen mode, then you remember it's a Disney movie), but he is not given much to work with at all. He could have been a truly great character, but much like Chow Yun-Fat in 'At World's End' is not in it nearly enough to be memorable.

Penelope Cruz fails to impress also, ending up just being irritating for most of her screen time. Only really memorable thing with her scenes is the very racy dialogue with Sparrow. In fact, for a Disney film there is way too many 'dirty jokes' for lack of a better term - hell there's even a rather in your face missionary position reference!

When the big action sequences start though, the film does get good. Not as memorable as the big set pieces in the earlier films, these are all quite watchable and that is quite surprising considering director Rob Marshall is primarily known for his musicals.

The whole thing just seems pointless. We've just seen it all before. You can say it's always good to see Captain Jack back, but we have 3 films worth of his adventures, there's no need to stretch out a story which was just referenced in the previous movie. And this one is the shortest of the series, at just 2 hours and 16 minutes, but everything still seems dragged out. Maybe if it was whittled down by 20 minutes or so, possibly losing the preposterous mermaid stuff (which was not in the book) it would be a better watch.

But I guess there is a need to stretch things out - money, and this will make Disney a ton more, as if it needs it, and probably set up a 5th installment in the series, albeit this time with no setup, just a brand new story. One hopefully more engaging than this one was.

**

Decent action, the fleeting good feeling of seeing Captain Jack back and Ian McShane bring his menacing bad guy to the big screen are the only thing that save POTC4 from a one star review. When I tell you The Lonely Islands music video 'Jack Sparrow' is more entertaining, you know the series should just stop now.