Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Review

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Review

Pirates of the Caribbean 4, also known as On Stranger Tides, gives us another swashbuckling adventure in the saga of Captain Jack Sparrow. Unfortunately for us it is a soulless shell of the original classic that began the series eight years ago.

The movie is simply more of the same.  Fans of the series will no question find some charm, and fun in this adventure.  They will key in to the fact that Johnny Depp is great at playing the character of Jack Sparrow. They will also delight in the addition of Penelope Cruz as a love interest for their favorite ambiguously gay pirate.  Fact of the matter is, that if this was the first of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, this series would have died on the vine. Like the other sequels before it, On Stranger Tides, is rather uninspiring.

The problems with this film are not in the performances, the actors all perform their parts incredibly well, either because they are skilled actors (Johnny Depp), well cast (Ian McShane), or simply well practiced at them (Geoffry Rush). These fine actors, as well as Penelope Cruz, serve their characters well, and do a fine job.

Also not at fault is the direction of the film. Rob Marshall does a nice job mimicking the well established world that Gore Verbinski created in the original trilogy.  His action is well paced, and not overly chopped like so many action films these days enjoy punishing us with.

The real problem with the film is fatigue.  The film suffers from being painfully unoriginal. It's obvious that this is a paint by numbers creation with no real original thought or content.  I can only speculate on the genesis of this movie, but I imagine it looking a lot like an 11th grader writing a paper on Blackbeard; lazily cutting and pasting Wikipedia articles, paraphrasing, and plagiarizing with no real thought to its coherence,  purpose or accuracy. Nothing innovative or new is brought to this nearly decade old series.

In my opinion, the lack of freshness in the series was a wasted opportunity for the franchise. Had they decided to bring something new to the series, or even just tweaked the formula slightly, we could have had the start of a new saga.  Instead we are given this stagnant, lifeless, clone. A copy, of a copy, of a copy. Just clear enough to remember that something special once existed, but distorted and blurred to an unrecognizable condition.

As far as summer movies go, it is by far not going to be the worst of the bunch. Sadly it will also not be the best.  I wanted this film to stand out, to show that there was life in this series, but it left me hoping that this would be the final bow.  In conclusion I leave you with this thought: is it better to burn out or to just fade away?