(2011 - USA)
Directed by Rob Marshall, starring Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Penelope Cruz, Ian McShane, Kevin McNally and Astrid Berges-Frisbey, Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides is the 4th episode of a franchise started in 2003, which has earned millions of dollars and fans around the world.
The main plot is quite simple: Angelica, Blackbeard's daughter, is in London pretending to be Jack Sparrow in order to find a crew and get to Fountain of Youth; Jack himself decides to save his first mate Gibbs and get there too. But the urge to make an attractive and appealing film made scriptwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio create an explosion of new subplots that ended up making no sense in many points (even the Fountain itself got lost among them). In previous films, there was a logic connection between one character and what was going to happen to it in the following episode. Here, stuff was simply thrown in front of our eyes without another purpose than just impress.
Some important losses in the cast - such as Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, Jack Davenport, Lee Arenberg and Mackenzie Crook - made the creation of new characters necessary. We have now Blackbeard, the "fiercest pirate of all", uninterestingly played by Ian McShane, with a shallow background story and way-too-forced father & daughter relationship with Angelica (played by Penelope Cruz), Sparrow's long time affair. There's also a new romantic couple created to replace Elizabeth Swan and William Turner. There wasn't chemistry between the actors and I ended up not giving a damn about what would happen to them, that's how cheesy they were.
Unfortunately, the whole spirit of the series was missed - but not the elements that have made it famous. Actually, those elements were just copied and taken to exhaustion, so what we see is an extension and repetition of fight scenes, running scenes and jokes, which are no longer funny and just seem fake and forced. Even the soundtrack isn't a surprise anymore, repeating and remixing hits from the other episodes. It might be enough for the great audience, but compared to the other films, specially The Curse of the Black Pearl, On Stranger Tides was just ridiculous.
It's clear to me that Penelope Cruz was just put there for her name and her face, because her character was annoying and irrelevant in most of the time - a total waste of her talent. Johnny Depp's performance as Sparrow is still fresh and uncompromised, but it's getting wasted and he simply can't carry a film on his shoulders alone. Specially when the film is so confusing, doesn't have a convincing plot and any relation with previous films (only the fact that the map to Fountain of Youth was got in At World's End).
It's sad to see that such a promising series ended up this way (if we can say it is in fact finished). Probably, companies will explore Johnny and the franchise until he decides to stop, and I really hope he'll do it soon, before they (pardon the swearword) fuck things up even more -- or worse, make new episodes without Jack Sparrow, who is, still, the only factor worth seeing in this whole mess.
