Rating of
2/4
"POTC: On Stranger Tides" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 11/13/12
Captain Jack Sparrow returns to join a race against the Spanish Royal Navy, the newly commissioned Captain Barbossa and Blackbeard to find the fountain of youth. The latest instalment of the most popular franchise of modern times contains all the crowd pleasing ingredients you'd expect, but somehow this latest incarnation manages to completely fail to capture the magic that made the original film so much fun. It's basically just like a piratized version of National Treasure with some Harry Potter hoodoo and supernatural beasties thrown in as it lumbers from one bloated, joyless set piece to the next. Even Johnny Depp never gets the chance to strut his stuff, being pretty much relegated as he is to weak quips and mincing between one special effects overload after another and seems more like a Captain Jackogram lost in a noisy, overcrowded theme park than the star of the show. It's not an awful film but even though the previous sequels were hardly masterpieces, I never felt bored at any point while watching them. This film however has the definite stagnant aroma of a franchise gone stale.
