Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean the Fourth: On Stranger Tides

Ah, June.  The trees, they are leafy, the flowers, they are blooming, the weather, she is making it too warm to sleep at night.  And in the mercifully air conditioned movie theaters, it's explosion time.  Starting this weekend, you can watch the X-Men blow things up again (or as a friend called it, X-Men: Hotter Than Before and With Accents) and soon to come, the return of Battlebots.  Sorry, I mean Transformers.  I like summer blockbusters.  Some of them are big awful failures, but there's something enjoyable about seeing a movie make use of all those special effects.  The part that starts to get to me is the oversequelization of everything.  You know, the notion that if a movie made more money than expected, the saga should be continued, even though ostensibly everything is wrapped up at the end, which I assume is the case of The Hangover.  I skipped that one when it came out, but I've been able to glean enough clues to safely conclude that it didn't end with Bradley Cooper getting encased in carbonite, Ed Helms losing a hand, and Zach Galifianikis sensing he needed to come to the rescue.  Now, there was a movie where you knew a sequel was coming.

All of this is leading, in my usual roundabout way, to me saying that I'm not sure what to make of this latest pirate installment.  The first one was unexpected fun, especially considering it came from one of the more cynical bases for a movie I'd heard of at the time: a theme park ride.  Of course, that was before the big screen adaptation of Battleship was announced.  The sequels had diminishing returns, sacrificing a coherent story for continuing box office paydays and undoing the happy ending of the first movie.  When asked to recall the other night what had happened in the third one, I had a lot of trouble piecing it together.  Bill Nighy was there, scowling, and there was a kraken, or something?  This new one has sacrificed all of that dead weight in favor of focusing exclusively on Johnny Depp's eyeliner pirate.

I'm not sure that was such a good idea.  While I'm not particularly enamored with Orlando Bloom's acting chops, he and Keira Knightley provided for a good percentage of the dramatic momentum in the original movies.  Most of the time, the two of them were just trying to be together, which, when it comes down to it, is a sweet, simple plot.  Jack Sparrow, on the other hand, doesn't have a lot of motivation, beyond a deep affection for rum, a fine hat, and his ship.  He seems like a good guy, since he does help the young lovers out, but he doesn't want anything besides the freedom to sail around.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, to use a sailing term, is adrift.  It has no wind in its sails.  Jack is the only lead now and the basic plot revolves around a search for the Fountain of Youth, but does Jack want it?  Yes, kind of.  But nowhere near as much as some of the other people in the movie, like Blackbeard or Penelope Cruz or some Spanish guys who are in the movie for no purpose I was able to discern.  Jack gets shanghaied, more or less, into helping.  He's Captain Jack Sparrow and there is a scene in this movie where he mops a floor.  Mops.  A.  Floor.  If you're only going to take one thing from the originals, at least do it right.  Well, two things.  Geoffrey Rush showed up to collect his paycheck.  He's been given a peg leg and slightly clearer motivations than Jack.  They have a lot to do with Blackbeard, here portrayed by Ian McShane.  Blackbeard is evil, mostly, with occasional nicer moments happening around his apparent daughter, Penelope Cruz.  He's heard he's going to die, so he's after the Fountain of Youth, and Penelope, well, she wants to help him because she thinks if he survives, she'll get the father she always wanted.  Wait, there's a good plot!  Daughter trying to save irredeemable father, even though he probably won't change even if he does survive. 

But there's also the Spanish dude (really, I don't think he had a name) chasing down the Fountain, because two sailors find a half drowned old man who claims to have been sailing with Ponce de Leon, who as we all know died two hundred years before the setting of the movie, and OMG, how old can the half drowned old man be?? and then you never see the old man again.  That doesn't even cover the missionary and the mermaid, which sounds like a joke, but isn't.

There are a lot of people in this movie.

Some of the action sequences are fun.  There's nothing inherently wrong with a lot of characters, other than the issue that constantly jumping characters can leave you with not enough time to fully develop any of them. But these movies need to either give Jack Sparrow some definite, movie-guiding motivations or else have other leads.  There are worse ways to spend time than in the company of Johnny Depp and that's ultimately what this movie is: spend two hours with Johnny Depp doing his cute pirate thing, see some explosions, and call it a night.  Give him a better why and you manage that most delectable of summer blockbusters; namely, the kind that compels you to keep watching for reasons other than the next big explosion.