Enjoyable And Entertaining If Formulaic And Familiar Pirate Adventure

Rating: 6/10 (23 March 2014)

Pirate Jack Sparrow is laying low in London when he runs into his old foe Barbossa, who has been engaged by King George II to find the legendary Fountain of Youth before the Spanish. Jack teams up with an old flame, Angelica, to try to beat them both to the prize, but little does he know that Angelica is the daughter of the dreaded Blackbeard ...
This is the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean film, and inevitably the series becomes a bit too familiar as it proceeds but nevertheless it's still terrific fun all the way through, and is also a completely stand-alone adventure in its own right, with only Captain Jack, a now peg-legged Barbossa and Mr Gibbs (McNally) returning from the previous movies. Depp is as goofy good fun as always, if perhaps a little more restrained than in previous outings but then so is everybody, and there's a good balance between action, fantasy and comedy. The best thing in the movie for me though is the score by Hans Zimmer, which is a great old-fashioned charging orchestral symphony mixed with Spanish and choral influences to produce a terrific soundtrack which is constantly propelling the whole thing forward. The origins of the film are quite interesting - it's loosely based on Tim Powers' original 1987 novel On Stranger Tides (which also partly inspired the excellent LucasArts video game The Secret Of Monkey Island), mixed into the Disney pirate universe, the (real) historical figure of Edward Teach and the (mythological) conquistador stories of Bimini. It's also more than a little similar to one of my favourite pirate movies, The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, which also involves a supernatural ship and a quest for the Fountain of Youth. It's maybe not a patch on the original Jack Sparrow movie, but it's great looking, very nicely made and quality entertainment throughout.