I think that my relationship with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is similar to most people’s. When I first heard that Disney was making a film based off one of their theme park rides, I rolled my eyes. But then, when I actually went and saw The Curse of the Black Pearl, I was shocked at how much energy it brought and how fun it was. And I came out of the theater, like everyone else, completely in love with Johnny Depp’s creation Captain Jack Sparrow. In my mind, Jack Sparrow was the first film character of this century that would live on through time and be remembered as a screen icon. It’s a feeling I’ve had maybe one other time since with Javier Bardem’s portrayal of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. When it was announced that they would be bringing Captain Jack back and filming two sequels back to back, I said bring it on. A trilogy of films would definitely cement the character’s legacy in film history. But then the sequels had a law of diminishing returns. Dead Man’s Chest was fun, and it developed the characters a bit more, but it started to get too bloated. At World’s End took that trend a step further and ended up as a complicated mess of a film. In addition to that, instead of getting more classic Jack Sparrow moments, the sequels had little to offer other than relying on callbacks to things Depp did in the first film. So, when it was announced that a fourth film was being made with a new director and half of the cast gone, I didn’t know what to expect. On one hand, it seemed like a pretty big stretch to continue a franchise that had already reached a natural, disappointing conclusion. On the other hand, with the lame Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley characters jettisoned and a fresh set of eyes looking at the project, a fourth Pirates film might prove to be a slimmed down thrill ride, and the best sequel to that great first film yet. Unfortunately, I don’t have much good news to report after seeing the film. While On Stranger Tides is a much more straightforward story than At World’s End, it’s still just as much of a conceptual mess, and kind of a bore.
The biggest departure that this film makes from the previous three is that it recasts Captain Jack Sparrow as the main character. I still found Depp to be charming in the role, and watching him slip back into those now familiar mannerisms felt like snuggling up in a fuzzy pirate blanket, but that’s where my good thoughts about Sparrow’s new adventure ends. The main problem with building an entire film around Depp’s character is that he’s fundamentally conceived as being supporting flavor. Sparrow isn’t somebody who can take anything seriously. He’s not a character who can remain coherent long enough to be relatable. He’s too mythic a figure to really grow and change. His methods and motivations are always nonsensical, and best kept a secret. To put him at the forefront of a film is to force him into being something he’s not. To shine the spotlight directly on him is to eliminate his mystery. Surprisingly, this movie doesn’t fall too far into that trap and keeps Captain Jack largely as you remember him. He’s a little bit warmer and fuzzier. He’s now more apt to cartoonishly chase after a delicious cream puff than he is booze and a hooker. He even admits to having something almost quite like feelings for a female character in the film. But, in essence, he is still the bumbling, rambling Jack Sparrow that we know and love. The down side of that is that we’re left with a character who has no real motivations, who can never really grow or change, and we’re following him around as if he’s a suitable protagonist when in fact he isn’t. Consequently, there’s a big hole at the center of this film where a traditional lead should have gone.
Geoffrey Rush rejoins the fold as Jack’s scummy pirate nemesis Barbossa. When we meet back up with him he has lost his leg in a battle with the fearsome pirate Blackbeard, who has also managed to capture the true object of Jack and Barbossa’s affections, The Black Pearl. Of course, Barbossa intends on seeking revenge for this, and to that end he has become a sailor under the employ of the British King. One of the great gags of the film is watching Rush’s Barbossa feign being a fancy gentleman now that he is all bona fide and official. If I had to choose a favorite part of this film, it would probably be Rush’s portrayal of Barbossa, and that’s something I can say for every one of these Pirates movies other than the first. He should be commended for his talent and work keeping at least part of these films interesting.
In a brilliant casting decision Deadwood vet Ian McShane plays Blackbeard. From the second he steps dramatically onto the screen in his pirate garb it is clear that McShane was the perfect choice to play the most feared of all pirates. McShane is always able to project an authority and a menace that is perhaps unmatched on the screen, and makes him the ideal choice to bring Blackbeard to life. Unfortunately, after his initial big reveal, Blackbird disappears into the background of the film, just casually going along with the flow of events like everyone else. As a character, he is ill defined. We never know his wants, his motivations; we don’t even get to see him do anything all that particularly evil. Really his character just becomes window dressing, somebody else to stand around and explain to us where the plot is going. On Stranger Tides is a film that has little time for character; it’s too busy trying to get everyone from place to place so it can put on the next planned action sequence.
Rounding out the main cast is Penelope Cruz as Angelica, Blackbeard’s daughter and a former flame of Captain Jack’s. If Blackbeard is ill defined, then Angelica is a walking contradiction. Her past, actions, and motivations never make any sense. We hear that she was seduced out of a convent by Jack as a young woman, and therefore holds a grudge against him. We’re told that she wants to save her father’s soul even though he is the most evil man on the planet, because she wants to put her fatherless childhood behind her and make things right. What she does and the things she says only occasionally reflect these motivations, however. When taken as a whole, Angelica’s actions in this film are a mish-mash of confusing nonsense. Clearly her character was conceived as homage to the Indy and Marion relationship from Raiders of the Lost Arc, but Angelica and Jack are no Indy and Marion. There isn’t provocative tension between the two characters; there is outright hostility. They lie to each other, betray each other, and put each other in deadly situations. They aren’t star-crossed lovers with a charming will-they-won’t-they plotline; they are outright enemies. Until the plot needs them not to be, then suddenly they’re a potential item again. There is no natural development or believable arc to how the two characters interact with one another. Their actions change on a dime in service of where the plot needs to go, and when we leave them at the end of the film I would defy anyone to come up with a way in which their interactions have caused either character to grow or change. And her relationship with her father is even weirder. Despite the fact that he clearly has no regard for his newfound daughter, he allows her to be first mate on his ship. And despite the fact that he is willing to shoot her in the head at a moment’s notice, Angelica remains stupidly loyal to his redemption. We can use the implied but unsaid explanation that he is using her to get to Jack Sparrow, who can lead him to The Fountain of Youth; but the reason he is seeking The Fountain never holds any water. The explanation of The Fountain’s powers and the rituals necessary to take advantage of them in no way matches up with his goals. And at nearly forty years of age, was Penelope Cruz really the right person to play the role of a woman paralyzed by daddy issues? Angelica, as written, seemed like a character a teenager would play. As presented I never had any sense of who she was as a person, and it’s because the screenwriters had no idea either. Before I go off on a further tangent about them, let me say one more thing about Cruz’s casting. I think that Penelope Cruz is a fine actress. I’ve seen her in dramatic roles where she impressed. However, if there’s one thing that she doesn’t do well it’s wrap her tongue around the English language. Why you would cast her as a Jack Sparrow love interest who has to engage him in His Girl Friday banter throughout most of the film is completely beyond me. Here’s a hint for casting agents in the future: if you’re casting a role that relies heavily on witty quips, how about you hire a native English speaker who doesn’t gag on her own accent?
Let’s get back to the writing. If there is one huge flaw that ruins this entire film, and there is, it’s that everyone was working with an absolutely terrible script. Probably one of the large problems with it is that it was adapted from a pirate novel named “On Stranger Tides” by Tim Powers that had nothing to do with the Pirates of the Caribbean world and contained none of the characters. The guys who we recognize from the first trilogy, like Jack, Barbossa, and Gibbs, were crudely inserted into that book’s plot, and the results feel very much like a square peg squeezed into a round hole. The basic story is a race between three parties to the mythical Fountain of Youth. The first of the parties seeking the Fountain are the Spaniards. They are mostly faceless throughout the film and really only appear in the beginning and the end. The second party is Blackbeard, who manages to pick up his long lost daughter Angelica and our hero Jack Sparrow along the way. The third is Barbossa, who has been hired by the British to make it to the fountain, but who is really only looking for a ship so that he can hunt Blackbeard and exact his revenge. The Spanish want the Fountain for mysterious reasons. The English probably want it only because the Spanish want it. Blackbeard and Angelica want it because there’s a prophecy that Blackbeard will be killed by a one legged man, and they think the Fountain can stop it from happening. Which really makes no sense. Jack doesn’t have any interest in the Fountain whatsoever, and only bumbles his way into the proceedings through a, typical for his character, random series of events. So there we have our fundamental problem. We have a laundry list of characters seeking out the Fountain of Youth, but none of them even really wants to find it for reasons that make sense or are clear to us. It robs the film of pretty much any potential tension.
Despite the fact that nobody really has strong motivations established, the film’s first act contains far too much exposition. You get a half an hour into the runtime and everyone is still explaining away where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing. If this was going to be a film that was nothing other than a simple race storyline, then it should have been joined in progress with everyone already going after the prize. Like both of the previous Pirates sequels, On Stranger Tides is a film that is needlessly just too long and it could have shaved off a lot of stuff without anybody complaining or without the film becoming any harder to understand than it already was because of poor writing. In addition to that, there is a subplot with a missionary falling in love with a mermaid that had nothing to do with the rest of the film, took up way too much time, and was annoying in how clumsily it was handled. I thought the love story between Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley’s characters in the first trilogy was cheesy and lame, but I hadn’t seen anything. The missionary and the mermaid see their lameness and raise. Every second that the two of them are making eyes at each other could have been used to focus on something else more fun. Especially since, as the film goes on, it becomes more and more boring: to the point where I was checking the time pretty often during the several false resolutions.
That lack of compelling motivations and narrative tension remained the biggest hurdle the film needed to get over, however. As I was watching it I realized that not only was Jack Sparrow not adequately filling the role of being the main character, but that there was somebody else in the story who absolutely could have been. Barbossa is the only character in this film that actually wants something. Being Captain of The Black Pearl is the thing most important to him in his life. Blackbeard not only attacked him and took his ship, he did it in such a brutal and violent way that Barbossa had to cut off his own leg to survive the experience. Of course, we see none of this. It’s just recounted to us in dialogue. As I was listening to Geoffrey Rush fill us in on all of the details it started to hit me… what were they thinking? All of that stuff he’s talking about is about three times more exciting than anything that happens in this movie. Everything that Barbossa does in this film is done with the goal of getting revenge against Blackbeard and reclaiming his ship in mind. Everyone else is just along for the ride, either because they wandered into the story on accident or they have some half-baked idea about what the Fountain of Youth can do for them that doesn’t even make any sense. The problem with this movie is that it centers on the Fountain of Youth storyline that appears in the “On Stranger Tides” novel; a book that has nothing to do with these characters. Blackbeard’s attack on Barbossa should have been the opening of the film. After that, Barbossa should have been the main character, not the listless Jack Sparrow. This could have been entirely a revenge film where Barbossa is looking to kill Blackbeard and take back The Black Pearl. Of course, seeing as The Pearl is also the most prized possession of Jack Sparrow, it would have been easy to introduce him into the story as well; and in the supporting role that he is so much better suited for. At no point did this story need The Fountain of Youth for anything, and by including it On Stranger Tides jettisons everything that might have been interesting and in keeping with the characters we know in order to adapt a novel that would have been better served adapted in a straight way with it’s original characters in tact.
But that’s all fantasyland talk about a film that doesn’t exist. What did I think about the stuff that actually was in this film? The production design and the acting have long been the MVPs of this series. Where the scripts fail to captivate, the artistry of the world never does, and in this fourth film that’s no different. Particularly impressive to me was the design for Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Over the course of this franchise they’ve done a really good job of introducing different pirate ships that all have their own personality and own look. The one change in this film from the previous three aesthetically is that is seemed to be a bit darker to me. At times I would even describe the image as murky, and it gave the whole thing a drearier feel than Gore Verbinski’s films had. The big action sequences were mostly fun, with a carriage chase through London and a sword fight that introduced Cruz’s character early on particularly tickling my fancy. They were both chock full of classic, swashbuckling action and filmed competently enough to where they could be followed and enjoyed. A scene that comes later, where Blackbeard’s men are attacked by a vicious pack of beautiful but creepy mermaids, also worked well for me. I was put off by one scene where Captain Jack used a length of rope and a jungle of palm trees to slingshot himself around a Spanish campsite in ridiculous fashion though. I get that Sparrow is always pulling off the improbable and often defying gravity, but this just looked stupid. So stupid that it reminded me of Shia LaBeouf Tarzan swinging on jungle vines in that fourth Indiana Jones movie. Also, I found myself kind of annoyed by Hans Zimmer’s score. If felt like any time anybody so much as moved a muscle the full on adventure theme was booming loudly in my ears. I didn’t even notice any music that wasn’t the ridiculously loud main theme; it was near constant. I don’t remember that being a problem for me in any of the other films in this series.
So, given all of this, how do I feel about the news that they already have a Pirates 5 and a Pirates 6 in the works? Meh, worse things have happened. While I didn’t like Pirates 3 or Pirates 4 much at all, I don’t really see them as irreparably damaging the franchise. A lot of people probably come out of these movies completely content as long as there’s some sword fighting and Johnny Depp acting goofy. And the world of mystical pirating is so vast and rich, and the character of Jack Sparrow so mythic in his conception, that you could easily have him traveling from place to place getting in new adventures ad infinitum. I think screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have proven, at this point, that they only had one good Pirates of the Caribbean script in them, however. If I were ever to get excited about the idea of another Pirates movie happening it would only be because a new, exciting name was attached to screenwriting detail. And while the character of Jack Sparrow being involved is absolutely essential to making more of these movies work, I would hope that they wouldn’t make him the lead character again. He’s the spice in the dish, not the steak. The way an ongoing Pirates of the Caribbean series could work is if each time it was about new characters doing new things, and the common thread was Captain Jack sailing into these people’s lives and being a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, I don’t see that ever happening. When we get Pirates 5 and Pirates 6, they will most undoubtedly be the escalatingly intricate and confusingly conceived exploits of Jack Sparrow and his new love interest Angelica. I’m sure I’ll be in line to see those films as well, but it will be as a critic only, not as an enthusiastic fan.
