User:Footsies/sandbox/Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is a 2011 American fantasy swashbuckler film, the fourth installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series and a standalone sequel to At World's End (2007). It is the first film in the series not to be directed by Gore Verbinski, replaced by Rob Marshall. Jerry Bruckheimer again served as producer. In the film, which draws its plot loosely from the 1987 novel On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is joined by Angelica (Penélope Cruz) in his search for the Fountain of Youth, confronting the infamous pirate Blackbeard (Ian McShane). The film was produced by Walt Disney Pictures and released in the United States on May 20, 2011. It was the first film in the series to be released in the Disney Digital 3-D and IMAX 3D formats.

Plot
The checkered past of Capt. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) catches up to him when he encounters Angelica (Penélope Cruz), a beautiful pirate that Jack once loved then left. Angelica forces him to accompany her to the Queen Anne's Revenge, the ship of the notorious Blackbeard (Ian McShane). Accompanied by a zombie crew, the trio sets sail to find the legendary Fountain of Youth. However, Jack's rival, Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), also seeks the fountain, as does a ship from Spain.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The film wasted the charm of the three previous films.
 * 2) The story is unoriginally as it tries to search for the Fountain of Youth, confronting the infamous pirate Blackbeard.
 * 3) Jack Sparrow, Joshamee Gibbs, Hector Barbossa, Cotton's Parrot and Jack the Monkey are the only characters from the first three films who return here. Neither Will Turner or Elizabeth Swan, the other main characters from the original trilogy, come back in this sequel, are they aren't even mentioned like if they don't exist anymore.
 * 4) *The rest of the Black Pearl crew doesn't return as well because Blackbeard apparently killed them offscreen, which is an indignant finale for many fan-beloved characters like Pintel and Ragetti, who were actually intended to appear but were ultimately cut.
 * 5) It barely has any impact on the Pirates of the Caribbean film series as a whole, as most of its events are ignored in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales; its main contributions to the story are the shrinking of the Black Pearl, the introduction of Scrum and Barbossa losing his leg as well as acquiring the Queen Anne's Revenge as his new ship. Even so, this film looked more like the beginning of a new trilogy, but as the next film picked up from where the first three films left off, On Stranger Tides feels like an "out of place" entry in the series.

Good Qualities

 * 1) Hans Zimmer's score is a best-selling point at all.
 * 2) We finally get to see King George II of Great Britain after just being mentioned in the previous films. Richard Griffith's performance as King George is also funny.
 * 3) Dame Judi Dench's cameo is pretty hilarious.
 * 4) Good acting, especially that from Penélope Cruz as Angelica and Ian McShane as Blackbeard.
 * 5) The romance subplot between Phillip Swift and Syrena is a good way to make up for the absence of Will's and Elizabeth's romance from the previous films.

Reception
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides received mixed reviews from critics, audiences and fans alike, with criticism for its plot, screenplay, direction, excessiveness, and lack of originality, but general praise for the acting, action sequences, musical score, visuals, and the shorter runtime. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 33% based on 259 reviews, with an average rating of 5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "It's shorter and leaner than the previous sequel, but this Pirates runs aground on a disjointed plot and a non-stop barrage of noisy action sequences". Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews, gives the film an average score of 45 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". CinemaScore polls reported that the average grade moviegoers gave the film was a "B+" on an A+ to F scale.

Trivia

 * This was the first film that didn't get nominated at the Academy Awards.

2010s films]] Action films]] Live-action films]] Disney films]] Bad Movies from Good Franchises]]