Review of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) by Machshot — 29 May 2011

To be fair, I wanted to enjoy this movie, but what was received seemed less like a professional scripting of a film and more of an adaptation of some child's fan-fiction.

The plot hardly seemed cannon and offered little consistency in the logic. How did an old man manage to be "fished" by two others? Why did Blackbeard need such a large crew for his ship when simply by pointing the ship would manage itself? Why did daylight only hurt the mermaid in the second half of that saga, when earlier the only issue was breathing in the tank? Why does everyone else just spontaneously begin to remember lore about the fountain?

The movie delivers on some sequences where the famous "theme" works in action, but this is not the Pirates of the Caribbean you once knew. You care not for the parties involved, and could only care possibly about Jack in his hopping and meshing of allies and enemies, but even then in the end the viewer is confused as to why Jack seemed to not care about the fountain.

Action? Yes. Plot? No. An extended version of the trailer is all you would need to see. This is the result when a stand alone film turns into a trilogy, then that trilogy gets a fourth installment. What's scary is that after the credits a possible fifth movie is implied, and that movie may be an absolute bomb.

Just pretend this movie doesn't exist and think of PotC as a good trilogy.