Many unkind things have been said about Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the latest installment in the popular Disney franchise, and while I don't necessarily disagree with all of them, having just seen the film, I feel that a lot of the hostility against this film is unwarranted.
Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is back, this time on a quest to find the fabled Fountain of Youth. Unfortunately, so are the Spanish, so is the King of England (Richard Griffiths) who has sent one of his finest privateers, Sparrow's old nemesis Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), and so is Blackbeard (Ian McShane). As the last film left Jack without a ship, and this one finds him without a map after he runs into King George, Jack finds himself throwing in with his ex-girlfriend Angelica (Penelope Cruz), who may or may not be Blackbeard's daughter and ends up joining Blackbeard's expedition in particular.
Now, apparently the use of the Fountain of Youth of this particular story is far from something as straightforward as drinking from its water to obtain eternal youth. Here, there is a "profane ritual" which involves two chalices, a mermaid's tear, of all things, and a victim from whom life must be drained for the drinker to obtain youth or vitality or whatever it is the fountain is supposed to bestow. What this does is ensure that, apart from reaching the fountain, the adventurers also have to find the chalices, and capture a mermaid and "harvest" a tear, something which could prove extremely difficult considering that the mermaids here have more in common with the murderous sirens of old than the Disney vixens spouting show tunes; these (literal) maneaters are some pretty nasty bitches. Unfortunately for fans of the first three films' CGI showcases (the walking skeletons for part 1, Davey Jones and his giant squid for part 2, and the massive whirlpool for part 3) the nasty mermaids and their showcase of supernatural talents (which in one scene are apparently enough to take down a whole ship) are about all you're going to get.
The movie gets from point A to point B well enough, and Johnny Depp delivers his signature gay (by his own admission), drunken pirate performance without missing a beat. Everyone else, including Geoffrey Rush, whose performances in the previous films were at least as lively as Depp's, is rather listless, unfortunately. If nothing else, this film is definitely a step up from the bloated, painfully awful third installment, At World's End, which, I had once thought, would have been enough to kill this franchise. I guess it's fair to say that this movie was never going to be worse than that one, though that does not really say that much.
Still, it manages to entertain on its own merits, although I cannot help but feel that what happened to me was more a case of managing my expectations than anything else.
What kind of sullied the experience for me was how, even though this purported to be a "back-to-basics" approach to the franchise, the producers still packed nonsensical devices into the plot in an attempt to liven up the proceedings. The "mermaid's tear" story device was probably the biggest such excess; it enabled them to inject the ultimately forgettable killer mermaids and to shoehorn a half-baked romantic subplot involving star-crossed young lovers in the person of a young missionary (Sam Claflin) and a captive mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey). Apparently Bruckheimer and company weren't confident enough in Depp and his onscreen chemistry with Cruz to make their story the only romance in the film. It was funny how the producers seemed glad to be rid of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley and their love story, only to substitute it with an even blander, less developed one.
There are also some pretty silly plot holes, some of them pretty big, but few movies these days really stand up to scrutiny when it comes to that sort of thing.
The funny thing about this movie is that if I sit here long enough, I can pick it apart and go from being vaguely disappointed by it to downright hating it, but I won't. All I will say is that if one has the money to burn and the time to kill, there are still worse ways to spend it than by watching this movie, but there are a number of better ones, too.
Score: 3/5
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