Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Pirates of the Caribbean:  On Stranger Tides

5/26/11

Carmike Cinema 10

Medium Mr. Pibb

Appropriate A/C

Sequels are a funny animal.  And this is the Summer of Sequels.  It’s fodder for those who maintain that Hollywood is out of original ideas (See review of Source Code a few weeks ago).  Only a few sequels have ever outdone the original:  The Empire Strikes Back and Wrath of Khan being the two that come to mind.  Reboots are a tough to pull off as well.  For every Batman there’s a Superman.  For every Star Trek there’s a Tron.

The fourth entry into the Pirates canon had me worried.  To recap:  loved the 1^st one, it will go down as one of my all-time favorites; 2^nd was okay but definitely started to drift a little; 3^rd movie was a train wreck.  By the time the trilogy had been brought to a close, there were too many characters, the story was totally confusing, there was a squid faced guy who talked with a clicking sound and a disturbing will she/won’t she story with the maiden and the scoundrel pirate.  I wasn’t doing reviews at the time but here’s how they’d have gone, in order:  Black Pearl 3.5/4, Dead Man’s Chest 2/4, At World’s End 1/4. 

Fast forward to 2011.  Bruckheimer, et al decides to reboot the franchise and Johnny Depp isn’t ready to turn in his freak card quite yet so he decides to don the Jack Sparrow garb again.  Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley are gone, as are pretty much everyone else except for Jack’s right hand man, Gibbs and Barbossa who is now a proper Englishman.  And somehow it all works.

This time Jack and the crew are searching for the Fountain of Youth.  Problem is, so are a group of Spaniards and the ever-feared Blackbeard the Pirate.  Enter Blackbeard’s daughter, Angelica, played by Penelope Cruz.  She and Jack apparently hooked up at some point in the past and there is no love lost between them.  The opening sequence alone is almost worth the price of admission and this film is much funnier than the last two and infinitely easier to understand. 

Penelope Cruz steals the show and Ian McShane’s Blackbeard is a great bad guy.  But nothing in this movie compares with the sheer beauty and terror of the mermaids.  Yep, those mythical creatures that you envision singing about being part of our world or chilling with Tom Hanks will have you walking away wondering if those part woman/part fish/part vampire/totally bad@ss creatures of the deep are going to come out of the screen and bite you.  And banking on the success of Stranger Tides, there’s of course a teaser after the credits leaving us to wonder if Captain Jack will be pillaging and plundering again soon.

My review: 

2.5/4, B, See it in the theater