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Review

Pirates of the Caribbean 4: You Seem Familiar? Have I Watched You Before?

by Zoe Chevat | 12:55 pm, May 22nd, 2011


“You seem familiar. Have I threatened you before?” It’s a question Captain Jack Sparrow likes to pose, and it’s one that might give you pause, or just a wicked sense of déjà vu. A disturbing sense that we’ve been threatened before is exactly what you can expect from Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, a dour, bloated whale of a summer movie. For two-and-a-half hours, you can follow along the worn dreadlocked wig of Captain Jack Sparrow as he searches, with about 300 supporters, for the Fountain of Youth. I was wishing for the fabled Fountain about twenty minutes in, because if it’s one thing that the fourth episode of Pirates made me feel, it was old. Grabbing a cutlass and slashing to the quick; POTC 4 is an over-long, overcrowded, boring ride, if your definition of a ride is a rattling wooden crate on some very rickety track.

And overcrowded it is. Every single frame of the good ship Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is bursting with enough carefully distressed wigs, dirtied extras, and smoked details that I can barely remember a moment. It was as thought the production, afraid its audience might get bored and wander away, wanted to cram in as much extra rigging for us to stare at as possible. Everything is extra rigging in this hulking, creaking beast, from the familiar catchphrases to the eerily repetitive set pieces. Any movie should be worried about itself when it’s earnestly cramming in casual cameos from the likes of Dame Judi Dench, Richard Griffiths, and Roger Allam (known to most of you as The Voice of England in V for Vendetta). POTC 4 takes no heed, and no pause, as it lurches along to its final destination.

Visual overcrowding, made all the worse by pore-revealing HD, is bad enough, but this swashbuckler suffers from that most terminal of blockbuster illnesses, TMB, or, Too Many Badasses. Nearly every person who swaggers across the screen is tanned, textured, and armed within an inch of their SAG contracts. Everyone is amoral, scarred up, with a nasty reputation and bad teeth to match. Even the young chaplain who shows up to provide a little forced straight-facedness ends up shirtless, sword in hand, blood dripping across his abs. What results is a sort of bland continuity in which a participant is neither charmed nor repulsed, only tired.

When the original POTC and its damaged sibling sequels came out, it was easy as all stereotyping to complain about those perpetual plot deadweights, Will and Elizabeth. Remember them? They were the future Oscar-nominee Keira Knightley (couldn’t have called that one in a rigged race), and the now-and-forever doomed to wear poofy period shirts, Mr. Legolas himself, Orlando Bloom. They were the Lovers in a cast of clowns, and yes, they were tiring, and they were the source of much fan derision. But without a terminally sincere couple to play the straight men, there’s no contrast to play off of for the likes of Johnny Depp’s craaazy caricature. Precisely the reason Depp’s Sparrow, Gibbs, and the scene-chewingly exciting Geoffrey Rush were so memorable is that they weren’t Will and Elizabeth. They weren’t the protagonists. They were the cool kids dropped in to ruffle the 18th-century ruffles, and seeing them sparingly was great fun. An entire movie of the same, though, is an enormous box of the same treat; bland, and likely to put one off the stuff.

I’m of the school of criticism that says you have to take a piece for what it is, not what it isn’t. POTC, no matter what you put after that inevitable title colon, was never meant to be high art or high drama. It’s meant to be fun, and that’s exactly what’s lacking in this fourth trundling addition. Any sense of fun. There’s an odd thread of cruelty running through the cloth of the movie, as the screenwriters take a misstep in attempting to prove how thoroughly badass everyone is, we swear. They’re pirates, we get it. They’re not nice people. But around the third time the death of a long-standing secondary character was unceremoniously played for laughs, even the twelve-year-old sitting next to me in the multiplex wasn’t finding any of it amusing. Except for a gag involving the desire for dessert (and that’s not innuendo), and a nice talky bit with Rush and Depp, the few jokes the film tries come across dank and damp as the seaside air.

If you’ve a hankering for some good old swash-swash, buckle-buckle, I would save yourself the cash and re-watch the first POTC outing. Sometimes the best cure for nostalgia is to cut right to the source, with a machete if need be. Savvy?

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  • http://xemily.com Bunny

    The first film had no right to be any good, but it was surprisingly enjoyable. My friends and I liked it so much we even created a drinking game for it. But I wish the filmmakers had stopped with the one, because I can’t even tell you what happens in the sequels, they were just so forgettable. I’m certainly not running out to see this one….maybe it’ll eventually roll around onto instant Netflix and then I’ll give it a shot.

  • http://twitter.com/Riviare Kimberly

     I’m a fan of the series, so I’d probably like this one. I think most of us watch just to see what craziness Captain Jack gets up to this time.

  • Nick Gaston

    Anyone else notice that the Spanish guys in this movie pretty much, um, won? I mean, they set out on their expedition, weren’t actually onscreen very much, had like one fairly minor setback that we saw, then accomplished their objectives and left for home without incident?

    These guys were like the SEAL Team Six of movie antagonists…maybe they were supposed t’attack some OTHER, more formidable movie this summer, and got lost on the way?

    (If that’s the case, I feel sorry for the swaggering, moustache-twirling band of villains played by Disney vet character actors who’re going to get gutted by Conan in August. ;D )

  • Anonymous

     vipshopper.us

  • Dolph122000

    Although the scene with the mermaids was utterly breathtaking and downright frightening (yeah, I’m a big wuss) at points, the movie was utterly forgettable. I almost wish I hadn’t put off playing the final chapters of the lego version to see what they made of this train(ship?)wreck. However, as sad as it was to watch the series limp to (hopefully) its finale, the most painful part was watching the fimmakers desperately try and capitalize on a main character that was simply never built to be one. Jack was never the main story here, he was the awesome eyecatcher that delivered witty lines and good times while we bore through the drivel that was the main love story. With Jack as the main story (they evn gave hime a love story?!) the film fell flat. It was too much “fun” and not enough story. Shame. 

  • Stefanie

    I refuse to see this movie on the basis that Blackbeard, one of the most feared pirates to terrorize the coast of North Carolina, did not have a fiery beard in fight scenes. He always had his beard all smoke and flames to instill fear in his enemies. Such things can not be overlooked.

  • http://zadl.org ZADL

    Actually, his first appearance on screen has the fiery beard, the rest do not. But then they wouldn’t make sense if it were burning in later scenes, as he’s not preparing for a fight in them. The day to day running of the ship and ordering people around doesn’t require it. 

  • http://zadl.org ZADL

    Personally I found it to be rather enjoyable. I liked the darker tone, and the abandonment of the prior films’ continuity. It felt like a fresh start for the franchise, rather than a continuation of the earlier films, and story-wise, that’s exactly what it was. 

    One could see this without seeing any of the prior films. There are only four people that carry over from the previous trilogy, and one of them has barely any screen time. 

    While I don’t think it was as good or as fun as the first, I think it stands as its own film, and was still very enjoyable to me.

  • http://twitter.com/g33k_gal Natalie Ferguson

    A lot of good points in this review and I mostly agree.

    My main issue with the movie was the lack of character development, individually and in regard to relationships. It was semi-easy to believe that Jack and Angelica had a fling in the past, but I don’t think there was enough interaction between them to make me believe that they were still battling love/UST for one another despite Jack’s betrayal. Well, I’ll say there was barely enough, but it just seemed like a poorly thought out plot device just so Jack could get some romance for himself. And as far as Phillip and Serena…that could have just been completely omitted from the story. It made Davy Jones/Tia Dalma’s sudden relationship connection from PotC 3 seem developed.

    I saw an interview with the director, I believe, who said that Blackbeard was supposed to be the most evil villain of the PotC movies and, as Blackbeard said in the movie, a “bad man”. Yes, he was bad, but the worst? No way. I was disappointed that Ian McShane, who my fanboy friends foamed excitedly about while I had no real prior knowledge of him, didn’t really strike me as a cruel villain. At least, not compared to Davy Jones, who I might have a fangirly bias for. But, c’mon! Jones enslaved men to his ship for a century or slaughtered them! He stabbed Will right in front of his annoying girlfriend. Despite the flaws of the second and third installments, Davy Jones was what made me love at least parts of those movies because he was just a badass villain who (while you may have sympathized for at times) remained a hateful badass right til the end. McShane felt…expectantly evil. Like, not any more evil than what you would expect the average pirate to be like. Blackbeard should have been ruthless and hard to love as a character because of his wickedness like with Davy Jones. I really didn’t feel like he ever achieved that status of BAMF-assholery.

    And with Angelica and Blackbeard, I felt no sort of emotional draw to their relationship or real desire to see him redeem himself as her father. They really had no interaction beyond brief exchanges of tense glances when Blackbeard was debating killing her just to prove a point. And the ending was just…not very satisfying. There was no real redemption or conclusion at all with what happened between them, besides proving Blackbeard was a self-centered asshole, but still not as much of one as I wanted him to be.

    And also, not a single sea battle. At all. The Spanish Armada was totally cool and CSI-shades-deal-with-it nonchalant…and there was no awesome exchange of canon fire with Blackbeard or the English. The Queen Anne’s Revenge had friggin’ FLAME THROWERS and all they did was burn up one guy in a rowboat? Worst waste of awesome CGI ever.

    Overall, in my opinion, it was a fairly entertaining movie that, in my haze of excited delirium at 12:45 AM when I went to the midnight showing, seemed cooler than it actually was. After I had a night to sleep on it and analytically pondered the movie the morning after, I found myself pretty disappointed.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=563223409 Vic Horsham

    Spoilers in my comment

    I quite enjoyed it, but I agreed the movie was quite bloated.  The plot of beating-the-Spanish-to-the-fountain seemed to be entirely abandoned fairly early on and forgotten about until their sudden, not entirely necessary reappearance at the climax.

    There were too many plots that didn’t go anywhere.  Jack Sparrow meets his MYSTERIOUS FATHER OOOO for a vague and not entirely useful discussion about the fountain of youth.  Jack appears to have already decided against finding it for some unspecified reason.  Jack discovers a pirate is impersonating him only to discover it is an old who impersonated him as an elaborate trick to capture him for no specified reason.  And his lover is impersonating the daughter of Blackbeard and wants to kill him for his youth.  NO!  She IS the daughter of Blackbeard and it turns out there is another subplot of her Catholicism and redemption and faith and something whatever.  And there is another redemptiona nd faith subplot going on between this priest and a ermaid that is apparently nice somehow.  And the forgotten Spaniards turn out to ALSO be a plot on faith and Catholicism and ARGH And so on and so on and so forth and blablablah…

    Meh, I only watch it for more images of Depp dressed as a drunken dirty pirate.

  • http://twitter.com/LDG22381 Melissa E.

    “Nearly every person who swaggers across the screen is tanned, textured, and armed within an inch of their SAG contracts.”

    Really? That’s because IT’S A PIRATE MOVIE, you half-wit! Did you for one second take into account the time period, the fact that there’s no running water on a hulking ship with a mast, or the fact that pirates lived a life that wasn’t moral to begin with?

    Seriously, can’t this website dig up anyone with half a brain to write their movie reviews? Shallow puddles of urine have more depth than Zoe Chevat!

  • viennsaur

    I honestly enjoyed myself watching this moive. And thats the point of movies isn’t it?

  • http://twitter.com/BelLocke Belinda D. M. Locke

    I absolutely loved POTC 4.  I came expecting a fun ride, and that’s what I got – no puke inducing love drama, just good old pirates-being-pirates-goodness.  I’d pay to see it again.  ;P

  • Anonymous

    I disagree… the Spanish were one of the most primal elements of anything hoping to have historical connections in any way… they beat the English to just about everything, and so suave and silky to boot!  
    I have seen the 4th POTC 3 times now… TWICE in 3D and once in HD normal projection and find it is a stand alone film… you would not need to see 1, 2 or 3 to GET 4… the characters were entertaining and engaging and as a historian, I actually liked the way they played Blackbeards evil ‘bad man’ with subtlety… too many people lack the intellect, sadly, to understand innuendo and subterfuge… el sospiro….

  • Anonymous

    I disagree… the Spanish were one of the most primal elements of anything hoping to have historical connections in any way… they beat the English to just about everything, and so suave and silky to boot!  
    I have seen the 4th POTC 3 times now… TWICE in 3D and once in HD normal projection and find it is a stand alone film… you would not need to see 1, 2 or 3 to GET 4… the characters were entertaining and engaging and as a historian, I actually liked the way they played Blackbeards evil ‘bad man’ with subtlety… too many people lack the intellect, sadly, to understand innuendo and subterfuge… el sospiro….

  • Anonymous

    What movie did you see Zoe?? Are you a POTC fan or ‘JUST’ a movie CRITIC?? I was at the midnight premiere in Victoria BC and the fans loved it!! full houses for three days cheered for the highs and lows of the film… it GROSSED $90,151,958 the first night, with a worldwide weekend gross of $886,873,258… someone must have liked it?!?  IT IS A PIRATE MOVIE, don’t forget… even my 7 year old grandson understands it is supposed to be “bloated” and over the top… YOU SAID “There’s an odd sense of cruelty running through the film…” PIRATES!!!! What part of that equation didn’t add up for you?? You are welcome to your opinion, but I am thankful I have the intellect to know truth from fiction.  The fourth is a return to the madcap entertainment and twisted morality allpirate movies MUST be imbued with, and POTC:ON STRANGER TIDES delivers in real coin of the realm!!!

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OSRML254ITFHTCT2HFQJ5AXJYA Adam-Paul

    Part 4 was awesome! the exclusion of bloom and knightely did wonders for this movie. it was action packed and had lots of jack sparrow, something the other movies were missing.

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