Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

TedFlicks Rating:

$8.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50.

A WASTE OF 3-D ON A FRANCHISE SHOWING ITS AGE

According to published reports, Johnny Depp has earned over $350-million US playing Captain Jack Sparrow in the first four “Pirates of the Caribbean” films from Walt Disney Studios. The fourth, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” is the first in 3-D. The technique is waste of effort in most films. This is no exception. 3-D actually detracts from the experience of Pirates 4. It makes images of this comic action fantasy on the screen a few shades darker and less easy to see.

The Pirates franchise runs in three-picture cycles. The first three, which lead to Jack losing his ship, the Black Pearl, all featured Geoffrey Rush as rival Captain Hector Barbossa, Orlando Bloom as romantic lead Will Turner, Keira Knightley as female lead Elizabeth Swann, and Jonathan Pryce as Governor Weatherby Swann, Elizabeth’s dad. Only Rush returns for the second trilogy. All the pictures run long. Pirates 3 clocks 169 minutes. At a hefty 136 minutes Pirates 4 is relatively svelte. Penélope Cruz as Angelica Malon is the new female lead, and the new bad guy is Ian McShane as Blackbeard — who turns out to be Angelica’s dad. Here scribes Ted Elliott (screenplay) (screen story) (characters), Terry Rossio (screenplay) (screen story) (characters), Stuart Beattie (characters), Jay Wolpert (characters), and Tim Powers (novel “On Stranger Tides”) (suggestion), play fast and loose with historical fact. Pic is set in the reign of England’s George II (Richard Griffiths), but Blackbeard the pirate died several years before George II ascended the throne. Keith Richards returns from Pirates 3 as Captain Teague, Sparrow’s dad, but it’s almost a cameo.

Pic is the usual tangle of subplots and Mexican standoffs with a touch of the occult. Depp’s Sparrow prances about the screen like the love child of Reginald van Gleason III and a drag queen. Cruz is the Latin version of Knightley, the woman who can stand up to whatever Sparrow dishes out and still return fire. The pair have a back story: He was her first lover. It adds to the deceptions.

The ostensible plot hinges on a chance discovery of a map leading to the Fountain of Youth, allegedly discovered 200 years earlier by Ponce de Leon. Said map is brought to the attention of the Spanish King, who orders an expedition to destroy the fountain under the rational that only God can determine one’s lifespan.

George II can’t stand the idea of the Spanish getting to the fountain first, so he commissions Rush’s Barbossa as a privateer to claim it for England.

In addition to the love subplot, Jack also has a mission — to recover the Black Pearl. Managing all this involves the usual sort of swordplay, bar fights, fights between ships at sea, and utterly fantastical situations, including a visit to the remains of Ponce de Leon’s ship which teeters on a cliff and can fall at the slightest provocation.

It is on de Leon’s abandoned vessel, with his corpse in bed in his stateroom, that Sparrow and Barbossa find the silver chalices from which water from the fountain must be drunk. Here’s where things get kinky (for a PG-13 movie). It seems that in this telling, the water of the fountain must be accompanied by a tear from a mermaid — sort of like the vermouth in a dry martini. Two people drink the water at once. The one who drinks the martini gets all the life to come of the other, who drinks the water straight and dies.

One would think that Disney, which owns “The Little Mermaid” franchise would have second thoughts about the next twist: The mermaids in Pirates 4 are not nice. They’re gorgeous but mean seducers who lure sailors into the water and then eat them — for food. Like Daryl Hannah in Splash, they sprout legs instead of fins when on dry land. Unlike Hannah, they die if exposed to direct sunlight. Herein lies the second love subplot: A Boy Scout of a ships chaplain
(Sam Claflin as Philip) falls for a mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey as Syrena) imprisoned by Blackbeard for her tear, and after some heroism goes off like a young Tom Hanks under water with Darryl Hannah where the mermaid saves his life. One supposes that this is a touch of mermaid political correctness.

Pic’s final reel is a grand Mexican standoff between the Spanish navy (whose hair is always perfect), Blackbeard and his crew, Sparrow and sidekick Gibbs (Kevin McNally), and Rush’s Barbossa, who has his own bone to pick with Blackbeard at the very fountain itself. Sparrow ends up holding the cards in a dénouement between Blackbeard and Angelica which can end only one way for Pirates 5, which is now being written, to come to the screen.

Now, a little bit about the occult — Blackbeard has some strange powers. One is not entirely sure why. He may have done a deal with the Devil, but one of his strange powers is to miniaturize ships he captures and put them in bottles. There, in a bottle aboard Blackbeard’s ship, is Sparrow’s Black Pearl — complete with the annoying monkey.]

Other than the 3-D, tech credits are what one should expect from a picture costing an estimated quarter billion dollars to make.

On to Pirates 5!

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Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides on Netflix