C-
In the movies, success often breeds disaster. Sequelitis has been a problem since cinema was in its infancy, but in recent years it’s become a Hollywood epidemic, and no franchise shows its dire consequences more forcefully than Jerry Bruckheimer’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, based on the Disneyland amusement ride. The original 2003 picture, “The Curse of the Black Pearl,” was an unanticipated smash, driven by Johnny Depp’s deliberately off-kilter performance as Jack Sparrow, the bemused, besotted pirate captain. It was overloaded with effects and uneven, but sporadically hilarious. It should have been left a one-shot.
Of course, its profits made that impossible. Three years later the first sequel, “Dead Man’s Chest,” appeared, much bigger in scope and lesser in effect. And then came 2007’s “At World’s End,” an incredibly awful end to what one might have hoped would be a misbegotten trilogy.
But no. The inexplicable popular embrace of that miserable picture had led to yet a fourth installment, “On Stranger Tides.” There are a couple of major changes. The characters played by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley have simply been jettisoned, and Gore Verbinski has been replaced as director by Rob Marshall. And the script has adapted a scenario from a completely independent novel, Tim Powers’ “On Stranger Tides,” to include the surviving characters, most notably Sparrow, his erstwhile first mate Gibbs (Kevin R. McNally), and his old foe Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush).
The result isn’t quite as bad as the last movie in the series, but it’s still a lumbering mess lacking any of the charm of the initial installment. Though it’s obvious that no expense has been spared to make it look impressive—including, of course, the employment of 3D by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski—the visuals hardly compensate for the narrative chaos, on which Marshall proves unable to impose any style or order. The convoluted plot centers on a search for the Fountain of Youth in which Sparrow is reluctantly enlisted by Spanish firebrand Angelika (Penelope Cruz), supposedly a lover whom he once dumped, to help her father Blackbeard (Ian McShane) find the magic waters for his own use. Meanwhile Barbossa, now in the service of the English crown, is leading a competing expedition, supposedly because a Spanish fleet is also trying to locate the fountain but actually because he’s seeking revenge against Blackbeard for destroying his ship and taking his leg.
It’s pretty much impossible to follow the contortions of the screenplay, which involve not only finding a couple of chalices from Ponce de Leon’s wrecked ship but also extracting tears from a captured mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey). There’s also a handsome preacher on hand, a fellow named Philip (Sam Claflin), who provides the necessary beefcake quotient, doffing his shirt far more often than would be appropriate for any clergyman while falling for the mermaid.
But the Fountain of Youth isn’t really much more than the movie’s MacGuffin, the reason for all the action that in the final analysis isn’t very important. “On Stranger Tides” is basically just a string of chases, swordfights and other episodes of harmless mayhem interrupted by scads of dull expository dialogue. It comes off like the sort of amusement ride on which the first picture was based, if you imagine a ride that stalls periodically to give you an unwelcome breather. And even Hans Zimmer’s overactive score can’t pump any energy into the dull spots.
The lack of cleverness in the writing is especially hard on Depp, who has to mug even more furiously than in the past to compensate for a lack of amusing repartee, but it also afflicts Rush, who gets a couple of laughs out of his new peg-leg but otherwise is left to chew the scenery without much payoff to all the mastication. Claflin and Berges-Frisbey don’t go beyond the status of eye candy, and McShane is curiously flat as the supposedly dastardly Blackbeard. Perhaps the need to stay within the bounds of a PG-13 rating required the makers to rein in his menace.
Then there’s Cruz. She’s attractive but shrill, and can’t sell Angelika’s prior relationship with Sparrow at all. In fact, the only moment in “On Stranger Tides” that might draw a genuine chuckle comes when somebody mentions that Sparrow was once hell-bent on finding the Fountain of Youth, and Sparrow responds that he’s still bent. That contemporary slang term always been the essence of the captain’s character as Depp’s played him, but of course the filmmakers haven’t been able to make it clear.
After all, this is a family franchise, and that PG-13 rating is all-important.