Wanted to Buy: Competent Writers

Rating: 3/10 (23 May 2011)

The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has always been fluff. After all, what can one expect from movies derived from an amusement park ride? Given that genesis the first two movies were a rather entertaining ride. The over-long sequence of Jack in the bleached out desert from which he must be rescued in the third film served as an extended metaphor for the life that was visibly draining out of the series. Now we are into a "walking dead" continuation of Capt. Jack Sparrow's biography as it moves from bang to whimper to bleached skeleton.
As a filmed amusement park ride the basic premise of the Pirates films is stringing together fights and chases like (black) pearls on a slim filament of plot. Unfortunately for On Stranger Tides the filament is absent. What we get is a disjunct pile of, to be kind, faux pearls. Each action sequence is brief fun but they all seem to be rolling around independently. First Mate Gibbs is back but only as a creaky plot device. The same is true of the male half of what becomes the couple in love sub-uh-plot that vestigially fills the gap left by the absence of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley.
Rob Marshall's direction isn't much to write home about but it sometimes serves which is far, far more than I can say for the script, that missing filament. It starts out promisingly enough with picking up the teaser from the end of At World's End about the Fountain of Youth and even manages to end on the same theme for the most part. In between though we have hackneyed cliché after hackneyed cliché and nothing near as imaginative as the "fruit kebab" or water wheel sequences of past films. In the course of this attempt to construct a coherent movie the writers senselessly rip off past literature and movies from The Odyssey to Hans Christian Andersen to Moby Dick and even Splash. I searched in vain for a writer involved in the script who had a single original idea. In fact, even the the 3-D seems tacked on and the Spaniards who open the movie seem like an accidental afterthought.
Take, for example, poor Ian McShane's Blackbeard. He appears to have some magical control over his ship through the cutlass he carries at his side. We don't get any explanation even in exposition for this power. Does this power belong to Blackbeard? To the sword? Is it imparted by the ship to is captain? We never know. There's a reference to Blackbeard having been beheaded at some point in the past. It's there in the movie but it's one more loose...ah...pearl rolling around the pitching deck without a filament to make anything coherent of it. And Ian McShane is no Bill Nighy. There's as little energy in his Blackbeard as there is in the script itself.
Though the direction is pedestrian - deadly for an amusement park ride - and the script an incoherent mess that doesn't stop the actors from trying to inject some life. Johnny Depp minces around and tries mightily to extract some wit from the not-quite dialogue with which the alleged writers have afflicted him. Geoffrey Rush is a wonderful, delightful, talented actor despite the fact that he's been shamelessly ripping off Robert Newton from the first film in this series onward. Had there been some real point to his presence in this movie I'm sure that he could have delivered the kind of performance that made us so glad he'd returned in for At World's End. Penelope Cruz, besides being beautiful, is also a wonderful actress, just watch her in her films with Pedro Almodovar to confirm my opinion. In this movie she's mostly window dressing and the main attempt to replace Keira Knightley. Ian McShane is the actor for whom I feel both the most and least sympathy. He does what he can with the script pages he's given but I couldn't help wishing that he too had more of a chance to break out of the prison to which the lack of a script condemned him. Then I think that he could have made more of an effort. Perhaps it's McShane's fault but I think he could have done much better.
On Stranger Tides is worth the price of a matinée on a rainy afternoon. Johnny Depp is fun. Geoffrey Rush is fun too though less so. Penelope Cruz is beautiful and delivers the line which will undoubtedly become the quest and McGuffin for the inevitable fifth film. Still, unless Disney can find a good writer(s) for the next script and an imaginative director, I'll wait for Pirates of the Caribbean: To No Real Purpose to show up on cable before I watch it.