All Jack and No Story Makes Pirates a Dull Film

Rating: 4/10 (20 May 2011)

I really hate to say it, but Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is just boring. While the second and third films were derided for their muddled and overcomplicated plots, this film hardly has enough story to fill a napkin and a serious lack of solid direction. The characters are lifeless and hollow, and even in the midst of action scenes nothing terribly interesting ever happens.
The Curse of the Black Pearl is, of course, the best Pirates film to date, but after re-watching all three movies over the past couple of days, I've reaffirmed my opinion that Dead Man's Chest and At World's End are worthy, if flawed, followups to the original. Yes, the latter two films definitely suffered from the fact that they began production without a finished script; Dead Man's Chest tried to do too many different things without taking time to flesh any of them out all the way, and At World's End was left with the impossible task of properly tying up all these disparate plot threads. However, despite these flaws, they were still enjoyable movies from start to finish due to good characters, and great direction by Mr. Gore Verbinski. Verbinksi gave the series a solid direction and a life that this fourth installment is sorely lacking.
On Stranger Tides starts out loosely referencing the end of At World's End in which Jack had taken the map to find the legendary Fountain of Youth. We're quickly reintroduced to the only three returning cast members: Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, and Mr. Gibbs; there's some fun stuff in the beginning, but after the Fountain of Youth is introduced as a MacGuffin it quickly devolves into monotony. Part of the problem lies in just the structure of the story this time around, in On Stranger Tides they broke away from the structures of the previous films in order to tell an Indiana Jones-esque adventure film however, the characters and settings of Pirates of the Caribbean do not lend themselves well to that kind of movie. And speaking of characters, with the exception of the returning cast, they are all just completely one- dimensional and uninteresting. Black Beard, who is supposedly "the pirate all pirates fear" is particularly bad. It seems like they were trying to go for a villain somewhere between that of a Saturday morning cartoon and a silent psychopath, but in the end it just ended up feeling phoned in. There's also a half-baked side story between two characters seemingly trying to fill the role of Will and Elizabeth's characters from the previous films, but again, the acting is completely cardboard and it isn't effective.
As I said, this film is just tragically boring, you can't empathize with the characters, you don't feel compelled to ponder any of the mystery, and even the action sequences aren't enough to make you sit forward in your seats. It's a meandering, poorly directed, boring mess. Disney is apparently planning a fifth and sixth film for the series, and if that's the case, I beg, and I plead: please bring back Gore Verbinski. On Stranger Tides is proof that the heart of the series lies not in the action, the locations, or even Jack Sparrow himself; Verbinski was the heart and soul of Pirates of the Caribbean, and without him the franchise has been left hopelessly adrift.
Rating: Zzzzzzzz...