REVIEW – PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN

This time Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack is on a quest for the Fountain of Youth, although I’m not really sure why – and I don’t think Jack does either; he’s just kind of brought along for the ride because this is a Pirates movie.

As you’d expect in this kind of a movie, Jack isn’t the only one after the Fountain. The Spanish (lead by no one in particular), the English, headed by Barbossa, who has somehow become a privateer and lost a leg (which is explained away in dialogue instead of shown), and Blackbeard (Ian McShane) and Penelope Cruz’s Angelica, who happens to be Blackbeard’s daughter and Jack’s former flame who we haven’t heard of in three movies, are also all after the Fountain for reasons of their own, all of which don’t matter, because the writers don’t give them enough motivation for us to care. Everyone has to be after the Fountain because otherwise the film would be boring – right?

Along with all of this, STRANGER TIDES suffers from the same problem as AT WORLD’S END in that it’s too big for it’s own britches to the point that there is a whole character subplot that is so utterly pointless that I think the only purpose Sam Claflin’s priest character is to take off his shirt and give it to a topless malnourished mermaid. He does a decent job with the exposition and pouty scenes he’s given, but the role is so unimportant that he is taken off by the mermaid into the ocean never to be heard from again. This entire character and subplot could be taken out and there’d be no difference in the movie at all, positive or negative. I take it back. The movie would be shorter, which would be helpful.