Strange Indeed

Whenever Hollywood makes trilogies, they have to tread very carefully. They want to extend the storyline to the exact point where the audience has gotten just enough and doesn’t need any more closure or information. If it goes past that point, the audience gets laden with too much information and loses interest to keep going back. If it stops short of that point, the audience feels gipped that they wasted all of this time without a significant end to the story. The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise stopped at the right point when it finished “At World’s End.” With “On Stranger Tides” it went way past that point and failed to find it again.

In “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” the audience finds Jack Sparrow in quite the predicament. His first mate Gibbs tries to free him from the gallows but alas he is captured and brought before King George who has a new right hand man – Captain Barbosa. The King wants Jack to guide an expedition to locate the Fountain of Youth before the Spanish do. He declines and escapes meeting up with his father who tells him of the dangers of finding the Fountain of Youth and that someone is impersonating Jack to attain a crew for the purpose of finding the Fountain of Youth. That person is Angelica (played by Penelope Cruz), Jack’s old lover and daughter of Blackbeard (played by Ian McShane). Together, albeit reluctantly, they set off to find the Fountain of Youth – no matter what the cost.

The premise sounds great and the movies flows but it seemed that the writers had too much story to put into a 2.5 hour sitting. The movie seemed rushed as a whole and Jack felt rushed throughout the entire movie, not sitting back and taking it all in as the audience is used to seeing him. To put it strangely, Jack Sparrow looked and acted like a normal person. There wasn’t the same bickering and bantering back and forth as with the previous 3 movies. The movie as a whole might have been better with Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann. Without those two characters, the movie lacks depth that Johnny Depp and Captain Sparrow cannot make up. The movie becomes too flat and doesn’t recover. The writers tried to bring that back with the introduction of the eye candy young male but let’s face it – you can’t replace Will Turner and you certainly can’t replace the script between the two.

I will admit I was a little hesitant to see this movie from the beginning. Without my favorite characters, I couldn’t see how it was going to work. I decided to see it because Jack Sparrow and Johnny Depp are amazing and the movie should have been good based on that alone. I was wrong. It was as if Hollywood decided to make a Back to the Future 4 and took out Marty or Doc; it can’t be done. The Pirates saga was a great one for 3 movies – they stuck the knife in with the 4^th and will drive it further with the 5^th.