Review of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) by Gagnar — 03 Nov 2011

The Pirates of the Caribbean movies have come along way since the first one came out, it was fun, mysterious and intriguing. Unfortunately for this newest addition to the Pirates universe it simply fails to deliver. There are three major drawbacks which dragged my personal rating for this move down to a 3.

First of, they tried compressing a to big of a story into one movie. The story lacks coordination and transfers the viewer from location to location, from plot to plot, from character to character in to little time so that you will just not be able to tell what exactly is going on. You will have no emotional bond with any character or the stakes at hand. The overall story of this movie is just simply to big to be put into a few hours. Second, the characters presented in this movie are just flat out bad. The leap in time between the previous movie and this one is just way to big to make you understand anything about any character involved in this movie. Jack is of course back, which is a pretty big drawback, considering he is actually the main character in this movie. In all the previous movies he is a fun and enjoyable character, BUT ONLY because he was WASN'T the main character. The entire movie now evolves around to many lame ass jokes and hes annoying personality, which was fun in the previous movies because hes personality was present in much smaller doses. Sparrow made the movie way to annoying and he's trickery and fighting action has become way to predictable because of it. Hector Barbossa suffered immensely from the huge time leap between this movie and the previous one. He pretty much resides with the Spaniards all the time, diminishing the characters value and time on screen, which is of course really a waste. Black beard also suffers from an obvious lack of time and story, he is just to big of a character. You will just not really get to know him as we got to know Davy Jones and Barbossa. He's daughter also suffers this drawback, although she is definitely not as interesting, which she could have been.

Finally we get to see this sailor priest whom, I guess, needed to fill up the more serious and romantic role in this movie, but failed miserably. The love between a mermaid and this sailor could have certainly be more fleshed out. Yet again, it suffers because of lack of time and story.

And last...3D fails, yet again. Clearly this movie lacked any of it. The occasional thrown dagger that gets a 3D makeover or scenery that looks as if it has a bit more 3D depth to it, but all in all it just simply lacks 3D. Conclusion: Very disappointed. It is way to obvious there was to much ambition (or lack of it) for this movie and it suffered heavily because of it.