Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

The two previous Pirates of the Caribbean movies were overflowed with creativity, never afraid to go overboard with the absurd. They were nowhere near perfect; on the contrary, they were flawed in many respects – the second was too long and the third too pretentious – and yet they all managed to entertain. On Stranger Tides, however, is a tiresome and nonsensical movie that doesn’t even feel to be the work of the same screenwriters.

From the initial trilogy, the best movie to help to explain the mistakes made in On Stranger Tides is undoubtedly the third. At World’s End was criticized because of the unnecessary and exaggerated complexity of its plot: there were too many characters, four hundred twists per minute and so many consecutive betrayals that it was practically impossible to keep up with what’s was happening during the most hectic moments. It was a convoluted mess. But a fun convoluted mess nonetheless. The writers, Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, however, seem to have taken those complaints very seriously, since this fourth installment is exactly the opposite of the previous one.

The plot is basic to the extreme and never manages to evolve: Jack Sparrow is aboard Blackbeard’s pirate ship, setting off in a race to the Fountain of Youth, competing against Captain Barbossa and a random Spanish fleet. During the journey, they find mermaids who act like vampires and several pretty useless zombies, and that is basically it. Even the number of characters is much smaller than before since many have been cut: from the old movies, only Barbossa, Sparrow, Mr. Gibbs, and the monkey remain – and their intentions are clear from the outset. The plot, then, is too simple, not keeping many surprises or twists under its sleeve, feeling completely different from the previous ones.

The writes try to streamline things so much that, when they occasionally slip up and start to make the adventure a bit more convoluted than it needs to be, they make the characters offer random speeches full of exposition in a ridiculous attempt to explain the situation to the viewers, to the extent that characters often refer to themselves in the third person, or even start to explain the situation aloud without anyone else around.

Even the villain, Blackbeard, suffers from this new direction, being completely cliché and offering very few moments of eccentricity, besides his habit of bottling real ships. The villain pales in comparison to the previous one, Davy Jones, and not even the competent Ian Mcshane manages to save him from apathy. When Blackbeard claims that he needs to kill someone occasionally to make others remember his fame and identity, viewers had indeed long since forgotten.

And because of the obvious departure of the lead couple, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan, the writers probably also felt the need to include a surrogate one: a priest, whose importance in the story is limited to this romantic subplot, and a mermaid, whose “love story” with the Reverend becomes the most implausible and irritating point in the movie.

The ever-entertaining Captain Jack Sparrow, the series’ raison d’être, is here again but is starting to suffer from diminishing returns. He is now the protagonist of the series and although the character works best as a supporting character – if he’s the main focus, his gibes and jokes tend to get repetitive after a certain point while his unpredictability becomes, well, predictable – he is one of the three reasons the movie doesn’t bore viewers completely to death. The second reason is Barbossa, now in the service of the king, which is here a much more surprising character than Sparrow.

And the last one is the soundtrack, composed once again by Hans Zimmer, who constructs an effective atmosphere, gloomy and mysterious, whereas the cinematography falters by leaving everything gray or covered by mist – becoming annoying instead of immersive. Now, the new director Rob Marshall, responsible for musicals like Nine and Chicago, demonstrates to not know very well how to direct action movies, failing to give a decent pace to the film by making the set-pieces, which are also hampered by erratic editing, last much longer than they should.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was meant to be a return to the series’ roots and provide a simple and fun adventure. The problem is that they made everything boring in the process. 

December 04, 2018.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 11, 2015.