Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides - Movie Review

I've never been a huge fan of this franchise. I didn't mind the first one, but thought the second and third were god-awful. So keep in mind I went in with a little bias on this one.

The Good:

- It's fairly entertaining. There are some decent action sequences.
- It's the shortest of the series at just a tad over two hours. Therefore the pace seems a bit quicker to me.
- Johnny Depp chewing up scenery as Jack Sparrow. You can tell he loves playing this character.
- Ian McShane as Blackbeard. He's always awesome! I'd love to see a move just about Blackbeard played by Ian McShane.
- There are a few good laughs.
- Mermaids are hot! One of them looked like Amanda Seyfried. She was played by Gemma Ward.
- The 3D is actually pretty good. You can tell this was shot in 3D, rather than converted after.

Speaking of 3D, I saw a few new trailers in 3D and I'm actually going to pre-recommend seeing both Green Lantern and Transformers 3 in 3D. The trailers both looked pretty good as far as the quality of the 3D and I think they are the types of movies they are lend themselves to the format. The Transformers 3 trailer especially looked pretty good to me as far as the quality of the 3D.

The Bad:

- The story isn't told very well. It seems to be broken up too much. I think the issue is because there are essentially three main characters and it doesn't really focus too much on any of them. It just kind of jumps back and forth between them. This is all kind of surprising since all of these Pirates movies were written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. You'd think after four films they'd have the formula down by now, or maybe have a thread that ran through all four films. It almost feels like all of these films were written by different people that don't remember what happened in the previous movies outside of the characters.
- No Kiera Knightley. Penelope Cruz wasn't bad, but I'm just not that huge a fan of hers.
- They replaced Orlando Bloom's character with a new character played by Sam Claflin. Normally I wouldn't have an issue with getting rid of Orlando Bloom, because I think he's the cinematic equivalent of watching a cardboard cutout, but the new character is even more boring and uninteresting. He just seems tacked on and there's no real reason to even have him in there.
- The mermaids felt kind of thrown in there. They don't seem to have any motivation other than, "they are bad and want to kill everyone for some reason".
- Too much eyeliner.
- It's immediately forgettable.

Seriously, I saw this last night (note that I wrote this Monday morning) and I'm having a hard time remembering all that much about it. Just flashes of things here and there. There's just nothing all that special about it.

If you're going to see it in the theater, do it as a matinee and I don't think it's a total mistake to see it in 3D if you decide to go that route. I think it's a rental for everyone else.

This is the tale of Captain Jack Sparrow!