Hey, he's Captain Jack Moneyrichardsparrowjet!

Rating: 5/10 (14 November 2014)

The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is a big McDonald's thing of the movies, where it comes slapped with the greasy paws of Jerry Bruckheimer and ready to sail off into matinée serial territory. This could be fine except that as each passing film goes on (with a couple of minor exceptions to scenes I'll mention) the quality of the series lessens with each film. It also doesn't help that this time the franchise loses one of the interesting things going for it in Gore Verbinski's visual/storytelling sensibility. While he ended up making parts of Dead Man's Chest and At World's End cumbersome with super-sized plots not worth much (albeit parts of Dead Man are a lot of fun, and the Davy Jones Locker segment of 'World's' is a perfect slice of surrealism), Rob Marshall just doesn't really have it in him to take the series where it could go.
This latest effort, On Stranger Tides, misleads in its title (not too strange), and is still stuffed with over-plotting with double crosses and other shenanigans and new characters. The premise should be simple, and it is: there's word of a Fountain of Youth(TM) off on an island somewhere, but as Captain Jack (Depp, of course still around once again) is off to find it he has to contend with Blackbeard (Ian McShane) going also for it. This could make enough for a movie, albeit lifting a bit already from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And there's a little extra intrigue with Blackbeard's daughter, Angelica (Penelope Cruz), being Sparrow's kinda-sorta-not-really love interest of yore. And of course the mermaids, who for at least five minutes when revealed as the blood-thirsty hybrids they are make the film full of vigor and excitement.
But then there's other stuff padded in to make it once again an over-long effort (not as long as At World's End thank goodness, but too long still), with Barbosa, Geoffrey Rush's most hammiest of ham-bone characters (whether it's also in his acting I'm not sure), also chasing after the Fountain but for more shady reasons as he appears up front as an actual "Captain" in the Royal British navy or whatever.
AND there's another goody-too-shoes along the lines of Orlando Bloom, though this time not him (thank foodness) but some other bland guy I don't remember his name at all and then he gets into some entanglement with the one mermaid they catch to take to the fountain. Why the mermaid? It's complicated... or, rather, not really, just a tear of a mermaid and some water and a couple of glasses and that's it... but it's more complicated than it seems, after a while.
Frankly, memory of this is spotty. Not because of it not trying, but because it just didn't try hard enough. Marshall's direction doesn't really try for anything that inventive like Verbinski was able to, and directs action in the most cardboard-cut-out of styles that one could see in any Bruckheimer actioneer. If that floats your boat, you might enjoy the movie a lot, but the action and excitement of past films (save for an escape scene early on with Sparrow through the streets of London, or some such town, and the mermaid scene mentioned earlier when they first appear and attack the pirates) is lacking here.
So, therefore, much of the movie has to rest on the appeal of its performers. How does it fare? Taking out of account whoever that bland-priest-kid was, and the mermaid girl equivalent (aka Bloom/Knightley 2.0), we got a couple of the regulars with Depp and Rush, and they both have their moments for sure - Depp especially has to carry a lot of scenes (arguably, even, the whole movie overall) on his shoulders, and for what it's worth in the fourth go at it he can still hold attention and get some chuckles... not laughs, mind you, just chuckles at this point. Honestly why they keep Sparrow's father, -the almost inimitable Keith Richards- as such a walk-on player on these films is beyond me as he could save portions if it was bumped up to a small role. Rush, meanwhile, is often relegated to exposition even when things should get interesting.
Curiouser still is McShane and Cruz. McShane could have made this a really memorable villain, but he seems to be tired through a lot of the performance, sometimes getting a little energy to yell during a scene, and not enough to make one feel that this is such a "Bad Man" as he calls himself. Cruz does better as a firebrand tough-girl sort who can kick butt and take names when need be, but isn't given much of a character either except near the end when there's some wicked double-crossing going on between her and Sparrow on a beach. It's a fine scene that the two actors have - and it's even a moment that shows why they're such *great* actors in other performances - and yet a little too little too late. By then the plot has turned its gears, Hans Zimmer's surprisingly generic score has gone through its motions, and mermaid tail (pun intended) is sorely lacking.
One small note to Marshall's credit, he gets ONE really fantastic WTF cameo during the city-chase scene with Sparrow when he lands in one of the carriages crossing town. I won't say who it is, but it's a self-conscious regal-joke that had me laughing harder than almost anything else in the movie. And a scene like when Sparrow argues over a big-giant-scary jump off a cliff into a river should have been the tone of much of the movie... and it isn't. It's not too terrible to hate (sorry House Next Door guy, this probably makes me a half or quarter of a c*** then), but to recommend it as anything other than at best a rental or a lazy summer afternoon nothing to do cable TV view would be false.