Let's face it. We don't watch the POTC films for witty commentary on the world, to be educated or to see art in motion. We watch these films to be entertained, and to enjoy the lovely, lovely eye candy that is Johnny Depp as a drunk, sexy, dirty, sleazy pirate. The films aren't expected to provide depth or complexity. We do expect a fun and exciting storyline, great setups for Captain Jack Sparrow to display his awesome, beautiful sets and thrilling action scenes. So how does POTC 4 On Stranger Tides stand up?
I want to emphasise before I start that I enjoyed the film. I did. You may not believe my in a minute but I had a lot of fun and found the film entertaining. It does, however, have a lot of issues.
Please note; heavy spoilers from here on in.
Plot
I would like to provide a brief,simple summary of the plot before dissecting it. I would like to, but I'm finding it difficult. At my count, plotlines included;
- Captain Jack Sparrow is on a quest to find the fountain of youth. Except not. Because at the beginning of the film it is made apparent that he's decided against it for some unspecified reason. Possibly because "it was hard". But his dad turns up for a scene assuming he is still after the fountain! And is never seen in the film again! Why was he there again?
- Captain Jack Sparrow needs to track down an imposter who is getting a crew in his name! And the imposter is a chick! And he once fucked her when she was a nun! And the whole impersonation was a ruse to capture him! Because why? Who the fuck knows! Not me! But it's Penelope Cruz!
- Penelope Cruz, AKA Angelica is on a quest to find the fountain of youth, by pretending to be Blackbeard's daughter, while planning to kill him. No wait, she really is his daughter and doesn't want to kill him but instead wants to redeem him. Oh yeah. She's a Catholic and this film is heavy with the pro-Christian message.
- Ian McShane , AKA Blackbeard is on a quest to find the fountain of youth because he is prophesised to die in 2 weeks. Who prophesised that? Who the fuck knows! The prophesy is thrown in there with no explanation just to give motivation to a character who, really, shouldn't need motivation to do something badass.
- Captain Barbossa is a reformed pirate turned privateer who is on a quest to find the fountain of Youth for England before the Spanish do! Except not! Oh no, he's faking it all to get revenge on Blackbeard for sinking The Pearl! Yeah, another tweest. I was starting to wonder if Shyamalan had been brought in to direct this one.
- Sam Claflin, AKA Philip, is a captured priest on a mission to help Blackbeard be redeemed for his daughter, and provide the romance storyline with a mermaid!
- Will Jack and Angelica rekindle their old love? Will they? Won't they?
The truth is there are just too many set pieces. The plotlines are all supposed to intertwine with each other into some awesome final payoff, but half of it feels cheap and tacked on. Like the stories I wrote inmy tween years, where the flying superpowered fox-person had the magic ring all along because that was the only way I could think of to crowbar in a happy ending.
Jack Sparrow has already decided not to go after the fountain at the start of the film and only ends up on the mission at all after Penelope Cruz tricks him, drugs him and conscripts him onto Blackbeard's ship. It is never really explained why she does this. At first we are led to believe she wants him to help her in her ruse against Blackbeard, but then it turns out she wasn't plotting against Blackbeard at all and really was his daughter, so again I am led to wonder why she needed Jack along in the first place.
There is some attempt to crowbar in a will-they won't-they romance between them, except it is obvious from the start that they won't. For one thing, every single instance where Jack acts lovingly or seductively towards Angelica is shown explicitly to be a case of him trying to manipulate her rather than genuine desire, even if he does confess to having feelings for her. For another, the franchise would come to a dead end if the fangirls and fanguys had their JackxBarbossaxMarySueSelfInsert slashfic dreams ruined.
Barbossa's "twist" betrayal of piratehood to become a privateer comes out of the leftfield with no logic behind it. The concept is so utterly unbelievable that the "twist" where it turns out to have been a ruse to go after Blackbeard isn't really a twist at all. And since we don't care about the motivation of the British King to get the fountain of youth before the Spanish do, we don't care about Barbossa's plotline for the first half of the film. The whole thing becomes an unecessarily ponderous vehicle to deliver a one-legged man to fulfill the "prophecy", which was obviously going to happen from the moment we heard about the prophecy and noted Barbossa's missing leg.
The entire plot regarding the Spanish could be removed and the film would be no worse for it. In fact, it would be better for it. Instead, we have a handful of scenes where our characters have to do something to catch up with or outfox the Spanish. Barbossa almost has a sea battle with them but... then doesn't because they are racing to the fountain and he needs to as well. The Spanish get the silver chalices and Barbossa and Depp have to steal them, but since Barbossa and Depp already went to get the chalices from an old shipwreck, so they could have just had the chalices still being there and cut out 15 minutes of superfluous film. The Spanish turn out to have gone to the fountain of youth not to drink from it but to destroy it, because they are Catholic and God said so. What a fucking tweest! That literally turned out to be a tweest in the final scenes of the film, so ended up being so deus ex machina they could have used any other contrived excuse to have the fountain destroyed. Like the Power of Love being too strong for it, or some shit. I don't know.
Either way, a plotline that seems important in the first few scenes of the film is entirely forgotten about and then used so poorly at the end that it feels like the Spanish fountain race plotline was retroactively crowbarred in to "fix" the ending. I don't think we even get to learn the name of the guy in charge of the Spanish mission.
There are actually multiple deus ex machina moments in the film. The mermaid-that-loved-a-priest is left to die at one point and comes to. Somehow she not only instantly knows that Depp needs the silver chalices and is physically able to swim to where they are just in time despite being on the other side of the portal used to reach the fountain, but she wants to do this despite the fact that, as far as she knows, Depp is one of the pirates that was happy to leave her to die a really rather horrible death. In addition, both the mermaid and our priest have fake-out oops-I'm-dead-now moments more than once, and since we don't actually care about either of them in the first place since neither of their personalities or subsequent motivations makes any sense, the whole thing becomes frustrating rather than exciting.
Overall, there were too many set pieces that failed to come together well, too many disappointing payoffs and too many plots left unresolved.
Characters
Okay, let's start with the obvious.
Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow continues to be entertaining, sexy, fun, laugh-out-loud funny and satisfying. His character is already well established and we get to see him cunning his way out of some really sticky situations. I do start to wonder how and why he manages to have lost the Pearl by the beginning of every single film, though.
Penelope Cruz plays Angelica, a former Catholic nun who abandons her vows and turns to the life of a pirate after being seduced, many years in the past, by Jack Sparrow. Cruz brings some much needed female-based awesome to a film franchise that up until now lacked a female character that was convincingly badass. Unfortunately, her plot turns dull. Cruz starts out as a cunning and devious pirate, able to give Jack a run for his money in a one-on-one swordfight, having deceived Blackbeard; the most dangerous pirate in the world, into believing she is his daughter so she can obtain an advantageous first-mate's position on his ship and eventually kill him to steal his life at the fountain. Then as the film progresses her plot changes. Now, she really is Blackbeard's daughter and her motivations are that she still clings to her lapsed Catholicism and wishes she could have a real daddy, so she plans to somehow convince Blackbeard, fucking Blackbeard, to renounce his evil ways, convert and be redeemed. Yeah, that's right. A Disney film where the main female character a- has no mum and b- has daddy issues. Oh, and she is still in love with Jack. So over the course of the film a female character goes from having a plot focussed on being an awesome evil badass pirate to one focussed on her daddy and her loverboy.
Ian McShane plays Blackbeard. Oh, I wanted to love his character. And I did really quite enjoy him, to be honest. An evil character refreshingly iredeemable who simply insists on repeatedly doing the most wicked thing he can think of at every opportunity. Whether it be using his own crew as bait to trap a mermaid, burning a crewmate to death for mutiny, staking a mermaid out to die slowly in the Sun, using his own daughter as leverage and trying to take her life for his own at the end, Blackbeard is satisfyingly evil. Actually, his obvious iredeemable evilness makes Cruz' character look not only naive and deluded, but stupid as well.
But I did find his costume disappointing. No, I swear that isn't nitpicking. In myth, Blackbeard was a truly evil pirate amongst truly evil pirates who was renowned for weaving fuses and tapers into his beard, which he would then set on fire, resulting in him being a roaring, terrifying vision of flaming pirate with his head wreathed by smoke. So what do we get? We see a few sparks fizzling away in his beard the first time we see him, as though they were just about to go out, and then he never sets his beard on fire again. The POTC series has consistently provided stunning visuals and I expected them to make a lot more than a lacklustre passing reference to something as awesome as that.
Captain Barbossa, as usual played by the brilliant Geoffrey Rush, takes on a somewhat more minor role in this film. His plotline is weaved more heavily into the main story over time, but his purpose in the film is so obvious from so early on that the various events that bring him to where he needs to be are simply tiresome. I don't find his privateer conversion at all convincing, not least because of that stupid wig and his refusal to bathe even when pretending to be a good guy in the vicinity of the fucking King of England. His scenes apart from the main characters feel unimportant, I don't care about any of the people around him, and he only really shines when he's acting together with Depp and the others. What's worse is, my other half and I have been trying to remember for the last few minutes whether or not he died at the end of the film. It would have been very dramatic if he'd died getting his revenge. It would have been poignant. I don't remember feeling any grief at his death, which would have been a genuine twist, but then so much of the focus was on the scene between Blackbeard and Angelica and Jack at that point. It took until I remembered that he went on to take Blackbeard's ship to be sure that he didn't. And I only remembered that when trying to figure out why Jack didn't take the Blackbeard's ship and the Pearl.
The Priest and the Mermaid played by who the fuck cares. Seriously. The mermaids were necessary for part of the plot to provide a mermaid's tear and some exciting danger scenes. I did not need a storyline tacked on in which a Catholic priest falls in love with a vicious, man-eating seamonster which we are now supposed to believe is really good, because it is a- pretty, b- vulnerable now out of water and without it's fellow carniverous siblings to back it up and c- pretty. There is absolutely no reason for me to believe in any part of the plot that the mermaid isn't just manipulating the priest as a means to freedom, since we're shown early on that manipulating and seducing men in order to kill them is what mermaids do. Even when she cries, I don't entirely believe it.
At the end where their love-story reaches it's climax, I expected there to be another tweest resulting in the mermaid hissing, revealing her fangs and dragging the suddenly surprised priest to his watery, tasty doom. That would have been a hilarious payoff, and instead we get a disappointing straight end to a dull love story. Now, really if Disney wanted to make a film about a priest and a mermaid falling in love, and have it be darker than the Little Mermaid, they could have done a whole film just for that. It felt to me like maybe they had intended to, lost the budget for it and couldn't bear to say goodbye to the characters, so crowbarred them into the nearest film that would fit.
The priest's purpose in the film seemed pretty clearly to be to provide a constant propaganda of redemption, and being Christian is a good thing, and being evil is bad and faith is good. His character and his purpose was simply annoying when I've come to the cinema to see a good-time film about pirates being sexy and bad. If I wanted a moral message I'd read an Aesop fable, maybe check out the Lion Witch and Wardrobe film.
Keith Richards as Captain Teague Sparrow is such a fun character. Dark and mysterious, like Jack Sparrow if he was played straight. I didn't imagine I would ever describe Keith Richards of all people as dark and mysterious. Dashing, even. It is a real shame he existed for all of one scene, said and did nothing of consequence and that his appearance brought nothing to the plot.
Gibbs, played by Kevin McNally, is a fun character as always. But sadly he seemed entirely superfluous in this film. There was not a single scene including him which could not have worked without him, and none of the moments where he drives the plot really needed to happen. Barbossa could have just taken the map from Jack in the first place, rather than trying to take it from Jack and then trying to take it from Gibbs and then taking Gibbs instead.
Action Scenes
The POTC franchise has reliably provided stunning, exciting and fun action scenes in every film and I very much expected the same from POTC 4, On Stranger Tides. Unfortunately, I had to see this film in 3D as my local cinema wasn't offering a non-3D option.
The thing about the 3D glasses and effects, is that it messes with your eyes. In order to see what is happening clearly you need to adjust your eyes so that they don't focus on things too strongly, otherwise you find yourself trying to follow something moving slightly differently to each eye and what you see becomes horribly blurred. This is fine in slow or mid-speed scenes. But in the complex, over the top and heart-racing action scenes in POTC 4, where about five different amazing things are happening in each instant, and with the number of objects flying at you in a LOOK AT THE FREEDEE way, there simply isn't time to adjust. You automatically try to focus on and make sense of everything.
As a result, I didn't actually see half of the action, as it just became an incomprehensible blur. Maybe someone who watches 3D films more regularly, or someone with perfect vision, wouldn't have this trouble, but it seems daft to make a film that only a small subsect of the population can physically see. It was disappointing, as from what I could tell the action scenes were almost certainly as brilliant and complex as ever, simply lost in the fog of 3D fashion. If I saw the film again, and I would happily do so, it would most definitely by the 2D version.
The Sets
Now here is something I really have no complaints about. The sets were as stunningly beautiful as ever. Incredibly detailed, lavishly over the top in just the way scenes are when you imagine them. From impossibly dramatic, verdant landscapes to bleak, rotting ships and everything in between. The level of care that goes into each set is truly astounding.
Conclusion
Pirates of the Caribbean 4, On Stranger Tides is a problematic film. Not the best out of the franchise by a long way, with plots which lead nowhere, heaving plotholes and wasted characters. But it is still a lot of fun. Johnny Depp is as dashing as ever and if you see the 2D version you'll enjoy thrilling action scenes in the dreamlike landscapes, and let's face it, that's all we really go to watch them for.
If you don't get your hopes up too high and can stomach the religious propaganda, there are far worse ways to spend a couple of hours of an evening. Just try to ignore the dues ex machina and tweests.
