I never thought I'd miss Orlando Bloom...

Rating: 5/10 (2 July 2011)

With this one, I think the POTC franchise has finally run out of steam. The Curse of the Black Pearl was a very novel film with some great characters and a lot of humour. Dead Man's Chest and At World's End felt a bit lazy because they didn't introduce much that was new character-wise, but they did at least have half-decent if slightly "caper"-ish plots and - through a few good lines, good delivery and good chemistry - they did manage to be quite funny in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.
I am not a fan of either Keira Knightley or Orlando Bloom, and before seeing On Stranger Tides I'd have said they didn't contribute a great deal and that the success of the POTC films rested with Johnny Depp. Good grief, I take it back - nondescript as he is, it turns out that Bloom is a useful and necessary straight man to Depp's character. I also discover that I have not been giving Knightley enough credit for the warmth she brought to the films, or the effortless chemistry she conveyed with both Depp and Bloom.
In On Stranger Tides, the absence of Bloom and Knightley is felt from the offset and the effort to wedge Penelope Cruz in there, far from compensating for their loss, simply accentuates the fact that Depp now has no one to bounce off. Honestly she's terrible, and I can't think of many other characters central to the plot line of their film that somehow manage to feel utterly unnecessary. Ian McShane as Blackbeard did about as good a job as could be expected with the pretty flat role and script handed to him, and the same could be said of Richard Griffiths as King George. I don't know, maybe we've just been spoiled by Bill Nighy and Tom Hollander but I don't think any of the new baddies had anything like the same depth and nastiness to them. The writers also apparently decided quite late on that they needed a nice character to lend interest, and grafted on a priest/vicar/generic holy guy who seemed to be there for no reason except to tear his shirt off at dramatic moments and moon over a mermaid (unnecessary as he was, though, he was still less gratuitous than Cruz and Keith Richards - yes, the man's a legend. But he can't act, he doesn't serve any purpose to the plot, and the novelty value's well and truly gone now. Please stop it.) It all just felt very disjointed, and suffered from that peculiar malady that seems to affect many films a the tail-end of a franchise in being at least forty minutes too long.
Look, it's not a terrible film and Johnny Depp is still - just - worth watching as Jack Sparrow, although even he and Geoffrey Rush, by this stage, give the impression that they're getting a bit sick of the whole thing. Just don't go in expecting it to equal the first film or even the second and third, because it doesn't.