Starring: Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Ian McShane and Geoffrey Rush
Directed By: Rob Marshall
Screenplay By: Terry Rossio and Ted Elliot
Suggested By: The novel “On Stranger Tides” by Tim Powers
Produced By: Jerry Bruckheimer
Distributor: Walt Disney Pictures
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 137 minutes
Website: disney.go.com/pirates
Budget: $200 million
Genre: Adventure, Action, Fantasy
Release Date: May 20, 2011
Given how pervasive Johnny Depp’s image of Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean’s sexually ambiguous, possibly inebriated scalawag of the high seas, has become, it’s easy to overlook that absolutely nothing about it should have worked. A movie based on a theme park ride seemed like the nadir of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy – Disney had also released The Country Bears the year before – and a pirate movie hadn’t been seen in theatres since the notorious bomb Cutthroat Island.
Depp, whose daring, indelible performance reportedly made a few Disney executives nervous, eventually got an Oscar nomination and wound up with what will likely be his signature movie role. Disney found itself with a very popular, very marketable film franchise. Never mind that the ostensible hero and love interest, Will and Elizabeth (Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley), were the least interesting parts of the show; Depp as Sparrow was the star, and everyone knew it.
Fast forward to two indifferently regarded sequels later and the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, On Stranger Tides, arrives with a back-to-basics approach. Gone are Knightley and Bloom, as is guiding director Gore Verbinski, replaced by Chicago’s Rob Marshall. Only Jack Sparrow is eternal, played as a mugging, bumbling, swashbuckling Indiana Jones of the sea (even cribbing some significant plot developments from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with a dash of The Goonies for good measure).
In a story loosely based on an otherwise unrelated novel by Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides finds Jack, fresh off another fine mess he’s gotten himself into, tasked with finding the mythical Fountain of Youth. Teamed up with former love interest/adversary Angelica (Penelope Cruz), a former Spanish nun he had seduced and discarded, Jack finds himself racing against the Spanish, intent on destroying the blasphemous fountain, and recurring nemesis Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush). Standing in all of their ways is the notorious Blackbeard (Ian McShane of “Deadwood”), a man outrunning a deadly prophecy and intent on having the fountain’s secrets of eternal life to himself. Not helping matters any is Jack himself – the only man with the map.
Some will say a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean smacks of a cash-grab, and there’s some truth to that; a significant portion of the movie’s running time is devoted to forcibly elbowing the audience in the ribs and going “Hey, remember that thing you liked from the other movies? Remember? Remember?” as characters and elements from the previous installments are paraded around. The “back to basics” vibe of the production implies that the familiar will be fresh, and for the most part it succeeds. Tides is not a triumph of expert writing, but veteran Pirates screenwriters Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott keep things lively and fun throughout.
The Pirates films have never been particularly logical or humble, and that’s part of what On Stranger Tides does best: shameless spectacle. Depp gamely stumbles from one set piece to the next offering Jack’s usual bon mots (“I agree with the missionary’s position”) and catch phrases, whether his pirate band is beset by beautiful, deadly mermaids or plotting an ill-advised mutiny. A weak subplot involving an empathetic missionary (Sam Claflin) and a mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) offers a bland romance that follows the movie rule that the prettiest people in a film, regardless of how long they’ve known each other or what they have in common, must fall in love with each other. It hardly matters: around the corner is another swordfight, or another quip, or another burst of Hans Zimmer’s musical score to goose things along.
Cruz, Rush, and even McShane’s hollow-eyed Blackbeard are there to play, and it’s clear they follow Depp’s lead in winking in the face of special effects death. It’s clever enough and, with Marshall stepping in seamlessly for Verbinski in the director’s chair, propulsive enough to keep everything from devolving into a Transformers-style quagmire of color and noise. Nothing here matches the first movie’s unexpected verve and style – you can’t go home again, after all. Nonetheless, On Stranger Tides nicely redirects the series (“rights the ship,” if you’ll let me get away with a segue into a series of nautical puns) into familiar seas. But as Jack might say, the voyage is the thing, not the destination. He does briefly pontificate on why he wouldn’t want to live forever, but take heart, Jack: you’ll live on in more sequels that are most certainly just over that horizon.
3 Stars
