Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

2011-06-10T14:13:00.000-07:00

It’s not so much a story as a single destination, to which every major character is bound; the script goes on, and on, about what’s to be found there. The fountain of youth, which Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), his old foe Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush, like a tranche of old ham retrieved from the back of the fridge) and everyone else seeks via treasure map, promises to rejuvenate one person at the cost of another’s sacrifice, but only if the right two chalices can be brought to it, a mermaid’s tear extracted into one of them, and the usual elaborate machinations put in place to postpone the big finale until everyone has bothered to show up.

Depp still has that lovely, floppy-limbed, seasick uncertainty of his, and there are a few frisky bits of business — swinging from a chandelier in a Georgian palace, scaling a palm tree despite being tied to it — that are worth the character’s while. Still, the movie never tops an early moment when he dives into a passing carriage in London, only to land in the lap of an astonished Judi Dench.

Sadly for those who’d pay handsomely to see a Depp-Dench spin on The African Queen, it’s only a cameo. Instead of the screwball sparring we want between Jack and Penélope Cruz, playing a feisty old flame installed as first mate for her father Blackbeard (Ian McShane), we get history lessons about their past, ad nauseam. Maybe the romance and comic chemistry were ablaze in those early days, but it feels like you probably had to be there.

This is the first of the series in 3D, and the main sense of waste — other than McShane, born to play a rotting pirate lord but settling for scraps — is how much gets lost in the murk. The lion’s share of the action plays out at night, rendered double-dark behind the greying specs. A visual tedium sets in early. My eyelids drooped for long stretches in the middle, and even vampiric mermaids and a buff missionary were struggling to prise them open.

Not for the first time, we’re at the mercy of too much clutter, a script with scurvy, and a blockbuster you could accuse of languishing. Landlubbing, even. Whose idea of a pirate’s life is this?

Kabuto Yakushi !

Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides