Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Reviews

Beaks, and other reviewers around the Internet, seem righteously angry at PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES, and I understand their position. I can even agree with it. But for me, it's somehow worse to see something so devoid of ambition, so workmanlike, and watching it you know this film's an accountant's wet dream and you can see the money rolling in.

If you have to see this film, knock yourself out, but don't bother with the 3D, which is pointless. Other than characters shoving their swords at the screen, there's hardly any depth of field or use of the technology that justifies paying the extra money to see it that way.

It's funny, I started this review just feeling mediocre about the film and here at the end I'm pretty much full-on hating it. Use your own judgment, but as for myself, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES was a waste of my time and a waste of the filmmakers' energy. Avoid.

Leave it to the PIRATES franchise to plunder the last of its own remaining goodwill. In what will be overblown by many as “a disaster” or “a franchise killing event”, many of the folks behind the successful series have returned to make what amounts to your average, every day, run of the mill sequel. While there are no doubt a number of missteps here, ON STRANGER TIDES never commits the sin of being terrible; it merely, contrary to its own title, sails through all too familiar waters and squeezes out every last bit of personality it can from its characters before running aground on the shores of mediocrity. It is the first of the series that fans can easily skip without feeling like they’ve missed much, if anything, at all.

If you are a diehard PIRATES fan, then you will see Jack Sparrow being Jack Sparrow, a number of your favorite side characters will make an appearance, and all the iconography you expect from the franchise will show up. There are some halfway decent action set pieces and a number of funny gags and one-liners. It is, for all intents and purposes, adequate popcorn fair. But nothing here will raise your pulse or make you hungry for a fifth installment. It simply exists and throws in enough interesting elements to keep your attention while you watch it.

I own a thesaurus too, my fellow critics; and I know how to use it. But I'm going to leave it on the shelf for my review of the fourth PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN installment for the simple reason that if I actually make the effort to walk the 30-or-so feet from my office to the bookshelf where my thesaurus sits, I will officially have expended more energy on that task than most people involved in the making of ON STRANGER TIDES did making this movie. I can't remember the last time so many hundreds of people worked so hard on a movie for such mediocre results. It's as if the collective goal was to be stupendously average. While I am not using my thesaurus for this review, I am selecting my words carefully. ON STRANGER TIDES is "average" beyond compare. It is not horrible, gut-wrenching, painful, god-awful or a plague upon humanity. It is simply a textbook example of putting in the maximum effort for the absolute minimum in entertainment.