Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides: Critic Reviews

Pirates 4 is a shining example of Hollywood's ten pages and a bang theory.

Its one real act of piracy is stealing away your excitement.

Never lives up to - or, for that matter, does anything to deserve - the recent parody tribute offered by Michael Bolton in a "Saturday Night Live" digital short...

A poorly scripted film has its forked tongue sticking out of both cheeks.

Some might find their enthusiasm for the Pirates films sinking. I have to say that mine is still there, just about.

It's a succession of ever-escalating action sequences and grand settings. At first they're stunning, then they're routine, then they're wearying.

The more sequels spun off, the clearer it becomes that one movie about these swashbucklers would have sufficed.

"On Stranger Tides" feels as fresh and bracingly exhilarating as the day Jack Sparrow first swashed his buckle, infusing new reckless energy into a franchise that shows no signs of furling its sails.

I never thought I'd miss the overstuffed craziness of Verbinski's originals - the squiddly extras, the moments of sheer pop surrealism, the Kraken - but "On Stranger Tides'' is like a familiar house where half the furniture has been sold off.

Jack will no doubt live to prance another day, but from Depp's fey bon mots to a cameoing Keith Richards's scraggly visage, his swashbuckling series is showing its age.

The new captain is Rob Marshall, who scrapes off a few of the barnacles that clung to the last effort. But he can't avoid the feeling that this adventure has run aground.

The movie was written by "Pirates" stalwarts Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. They're funny guys, and the script might well be funny too, but it's hard to tell from the metronome rhythms set for the actors by the director, Rob Marshall...

Dead Man's Chest and At World's End meandered so far off course, and took so long to get there, that almost any Act 4 encore would qualify as a quantum leap forward.

Ian McShane gives Blackbeard as much menace as a goofball romp can handle.

...at a mere two hours and eight minutes, the fourth and latest installment is the shortest... but by the end one feels as if one has had a full 180-minute meal.

I've never seen a film in which what was actually onscreen seemed so irrelevant.

Depp, grimacing, edges in and out of the action and seems irrelevant and bored most of the time.

For me, it's too much of a muchness.

Stranger tides? Stranger than what? What's strange, or fresh, about any of the mechanical diversions on offer here?

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer serves up another five-course meal of cinematic fast food, with all the familiar ingredients in exact measurements and just enough flavor to make them palatable.

There's little if anything here to keep us emotionally invested, and so the pile-it-on mutinies and sword fights and perilous dives off vertiginous cliffs exist just to wow us.

This episode feels like the fourth film in a trilogy, wheezing along when it should leap, relying on our affection for recurring characters rather than taking us on a bold new journey of discovery.

It's never quite clear what the relationship between Jack and Angelica is. Sometimes it's love, sometimes it's hate; it probably depended on who was writing the script that day.

The movie is a series of distractions tossed together in the hopes that they will come together in a coherent story. That never really happens.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides serves as a welcome corrective, reviving the fun, feather-light frivolity that any film based on a Disneyland ride ought to exhibit.