For the
sake of not having to write the same intro a million
different ways throughout the rest of time, just know that
this column avoids the overly long and sometimes dull
process of full film reviews and instead opts to break
things down based on what I thought going in, what happened
while I was there and what I learned at the end of it all.
Thanks for reading!
The
Breakdown - Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
The Impression:
No one wanted a fourth film in this franchise. Honestly, I
liked the last two films in the series. Almost loved the
idea of a world where all of the myths of the sea existed
and were exploited by gold-tooth pirates. Were they
immaculately made? No. Were they entertaining? They tried.
Do I want a fourth film? Not even a little.
The Reality:
Way to drive your enormous franchise directly on to the
beach Disney. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
is, as everyone expected, a teeth-bared money grab. A film
that is so lacking in the soul and inspiration of the
preceding movies, you’d imagine George Lucas might have had
his hands on it. Gore Verbinski is, sadly, gone, and Rob
Marshall has been sticky tacked to the director’s chair and
now Johnny Depp is the film’s drunken, comic lead Jack
Sparrow. This go around, the treasure is the Fountain of
Youth and the villain is Ian McShane’s surprisingly boring
Blackbeard. There’s a ''romantic" lead for Sparrow and
Geoffrey Rush’s Barbosa is back to hobble around on one leg.
I could just keep writing trite summaries of the film,
because simple, boring sentences entertain me more than a
single moment of this awful film did. The film is lifeless,
a collection of comic bits and ideas cobbled together from
the first three films, glued together by a certified hack.
Jack Sparrow is ostensibly the lead, but there are so many
characters running around, that his drunken pirate becomes a
gee-whiz comic character, meandering about the sidelines.
The great hope of a reinvention of this franchise was that
some of the bloated love-handles of the first films would be
sliced in to oblivion, but this is not the case. Marshall
instead chooses to start his film with an hour and a half of
character re-introduction that twists the narrative in to a
sizable knot while leaving him a scant forty-five minutes to
untangle it. These character reintroductions are slim on
actual development, and the movie turns in to a
boulder-paced collection of aggravating "chase sequences"
and a mermaid massacre. Don’t even get me started on the
zombie pirates, mermaid/human love story, and the attempt to
make Penelope Cruz a dangerous seawomen.
My biggest complaint about the film: this film is about
pirates and three-fourths of its running time finds it
sea-legged adventurers traipsing about a jungle. Get your
shit together Marshall before you bring your heavy hand to
play in ruining The Thin Man for a new generation.
The Lesson:
Blockbusters never change. If they do, they’re not called
blockbusters.
- Noah Sanders
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