Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
5/28/11
Before the 20th Anniversary
Star Wars reissues and the subsequent prequel saga infected Hollywood
with a crazed worship of the trilogy, movie franchises sprawled on and
on like the undead, grasping ever more desperately with an increasingly
small number of original cast members at some, any new excuse to collect
your ticket money. The 2003 blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean:
The Curse of the Black Pearl was designed to cash in on and reinvigorate
public interest in a popular Disney theme park attraction and succeeded
at doing both and more in large part thanks to an astonishing Johnny Depp
performance that almost walked off with an Oscar. But it's easy to
forget that the original Pirates was also a really great movie,
and in fact both of the sequels that retroactively trilogyized it did just
that. Dead Man's Chest and At World's
End were insanely busy, dark-hearted spectacles filled with long-lost
families, new characters and above all else double-crosses, piled up so
noisily and relentlessly that one noticed only in retrospect they were
twice as long and half as interesting as their predecessor. With
the benefit of hindsight, director Rob Marshall (replacing Gore Verbinski,
who helmed all three previous Pirates) tries to get back to basics
with Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. But
instead, what he's come up with is an old school desperation sequel.
Depp is back in fine form as Captain Jack Sparrow, and fans of the character
should get a kick out of seeing him actually at the center of his own story
for a change. But after a strong start, Tides flails about
harder and harder looking for a reason to exist, and by the climax has
lost almost all of the energy and inventiveness that made the original
something special. If you like Jack, odds are, you'll like On
Stranger Tides. But as missed opportunities and sub-par new characters
pile up all around him, it's hard not to be a little disappointed with
it as well.
Gibbs (Kevin McNally), old
associate of Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), stands trial for in fact
being the legendary Pirate. The Captain shows up for a jailbreak,
but all he does is deliver them into the clutches of King George (Richard
Griffiths). The King knows what those of us who remember the closing
moments of At World's End do: when we
last saw Jack and his nemesis Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), they were
both searching for the legendary Fountain of Youth. Now, the Spanish
appear to be looking for it as well, and the Crown has enlisted Barbossa's
help to beat them to the punch. Jack, who briefly had a map and knows
where the Fountain is, refuses to go along, but his search for a mysterious
impostor raising a crew to sail to the Fountain gets him mixed up with
others on the quest. Angelica (Penelope Cruz) is a former love with
an infamous father: Blackbeard (Ian McShane). They know that
a ritual to tap the fountain's powers requires two goblets located on the
scuttled ship of Ponce de Leon and the tears of a mermaid. These
are no Disney animated mermaids, mind you: they're cannibalistic
sirens. But when the crew captures Syrena (Astrid Berges-Frisbey),
her fellow Blackbeard captive, missionary Philip (Sam Clafin), sees the
good in her and falls in love. With the Spaniards and English in
hot pursuit, they begin their trek through the jungle to the place where
the ritual can be performed. Two cups; the one who drinks the water
of the fountain alone will die and the one who drinks it with a mermaid's
tear will gain all that person's remaining days. Who will control
the Fountain of Youth and gain the chance to live forever?
The funny thing about Pirates
of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is that it is at once incredibly
complicated and oddly uneventful. I left out a lot of setup:
Barbossa lost his leg in a Blackbeard attack that claimed the Black Pearl,
and Blackbeard for his part is on the run from a prophecy of his own death
at the hand of a one-legged man. The legendary pirate is bursting
at the seams with supernatural powers, having turned many of his crew into
future-predicting unkillable zombies and wilding a powerful sword that
allows him to seize control of the very riggings of ships and use them
as weapons. Transforming Tim Powers' 1987 novel "On Stranger Tides"
into a Pirates adventure, writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio are
trying to work a lot of different themes about regret, religion and mortality,
but the deeper they get into their story, the less proves to be there.
Strangely, all of the movie's biggest action sequences come at the beginning,
when there is an impressive amount of period spectacle and Blackbeard evil,
but by the time we get to the fountain, characters mostly stand around
or fight for no apparent reason. Jack actually has a line about the
foolishness of everyone swordfighting because of a personal grudge between
their captains, but that's not something you really want to underline.
And don't get me started on the Spaniards, who are almost a reverse Deus
Ex Machina, showing up to derail the plot just when we least need them.
What works is mostly what
worked before: Barbossa and Gibbs are fun characters it's nice to
see again and, of course, Depp's Captain Jack is one of the all-time great
movie characters. He was, for all he overshadowed the stars, a supporting
player in the original Pirates and at best a co-lead in the sequels,
so it's interesting to watch the writers take on the challenge of putting
him at the movie's center. They have succeeded admirably. While
the sequels are driven by backstabbing and betrayal, he was in the original
a lovable rascal who found himself doing the right thing when push came
to shove. So it doesn't feel out of character to find him as Tides'
moral compass. He's very funny when the movie allows him to be (the
stuff with the Jack impostor is an outrageous delight) and always cool.
Again hearkening back to his origins, the movie smartly allows everyone
around Jack to realize how profoundly strange he is, and that makes his
very willingness to show his face in public an act of courage. The
coolest movie characters are the ones who aren't afraid to be themselves,
and nobody's more themself than Captain Jack Sparrow.
McShane makes a fine Blackbeard,
so good in fact that it's a shame the movie runs out of good stuff for
him to do. How do you give a man the power to make ships come alive,
turn men into zombies, shrink ships into bottles and menace the heroes
with voodoo dolls, only to structure the third act such that he has access
to none of those cool powers? Cruz is spirited and has good romantic
chemistry with Depp, but Angelica is a refugee from the first two sequels,
so busy lying to and double-crossing everyone that I simply didn't care
about her when the movie expected me to. Clafin is OK at the upstanding
missionary aspects of Philip's character, but he comes off as a stone cold
dupe when he falls for a mermaid who, from everything we've seen, is hard-wired
to be attractive and always needs his help. The script goes to endless
pains to make Syrena sympathetic, but there's just no effort to reconcile
what we see of the other mermaids (you know, the big sharp teeth and the
eating people) with what we see of her. If she's a nice mermaid who
eats no one, what does she eat? What are we to make of the
final moment between she and Philip, which hints at an alternate explanation
to all we've seen that isn't backed up by anything. Berges-Frisbey
is defenseless against the role, as everything it calls for her to do feels
wrong.
I've been crying out for
a while to see a big studio blockbuster that's actually shot in 3D rather
than retroactively converted into a cheap imitation of one, and Marshall
did indeed shoot On Stranger Tides with the 3D cameras. And
we do indeed get to see some pretty-looking water, and the spectacle of
the pirate ships sailing with all their individual crew members standing
out and shadows of the masts visible on a plane behind their billowing
sails is very cool. Problem is, other than that sword coming through
the door that figures prominently in the trailer, Marshall doesn't seem
interested in doing anything with the effect. If audiences are to
be expected to pay for 3D, directors are going to have to use it, not just
have it around. If the talkies had included virtually no dialog or
Technicolor movies filled their screens with men in black covered with
mud under overcast skies, neither technology would have caught on.
Pirates of the Caribbean:
On Stranger Tides falls roughly between the quality of the superiorly
exciting At World's End and the more pointless
Dead Man's Chest, none of which approach The Curse of the Black
Pearl, a tough bar for any future Pirates sequel to approach.
While the new film ends with teases of further adventures of Angelica and
company, it's unlikely they'll make anyone forget departing original stars
Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley, and I'd expect the next Pirates
to again start from scratch. Meanwhile, Tides gives you another
two hours with Captain Jack Sparrow, which isn't a bad thing. We
tend to ask for more from sequels these days, but by the time you know
what you're getting, Disney does have your money. |
