Now, I’m more of a ninja man for preference but I enjoy the buckling of swash as much as any man and I’ll have it noted that the name of this blog that ye do be readin’ was originally my idea. And so it is, I feel, with a small amount authority that I can tell you about the fourth instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean series: On Stranger Tides.
Most important thing about this one; Captain Jack Sparrow is the star almost exclusively. The only other characters who get anything like the same screen time are other pirates, one of whom is freaking BLACKBEARD so that’s badass. That damned whiny Orlando Bloom character is mercifully absent as is that skinny girl whose name I can never remember, you know the one. Bend it like Beckham, she got made king of the pirates in the last film. Her.
Anyway! That leaves this instalment plenty of time for the unrealistically AWESOME action scenes that made people love the Pirates films in the first place. Sparrow swings from chandeliers, jumps between horse drawn carriages while avoiding gunshot, fights with swords, steals the king's cream cakes and generally oozes the same roguish flair the character’s known for.
There are of course some down sides. For one thing there is a distinct lack men made of rubber, 70 year olds who can punch islands in half, guys who fight with more swords at any one time than they have hands to carry them in OR mysterious superpower granting fruit of diabolic origin. COME ON DISNEY! These are things I’ve come to expect from my pirate themed media and if you can’t keep up then you shouldn’t be in the race.
There ARE mermaids though. And they are NOT like the one in that other Disney film you may have seen. They will fucking kill you. There’s a scene where Blackbeard’s crew tries to catch one (apparently you need fresh mermaid’s tears to make the fountain of youth work, I don’t know why) and they get absolutely brutalised. It’s quite a spectacle. But in the end they do catch one and it’s the worst thing that happens in the movie. Why? Because FOR SOME REASON there’s a missionary on Blackboards ship and FOR SOME REASON he falls in love with the captured sea demon and spends the rest of the film whining on about her twice as earnestly as Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan ever got. Thankfully though that character is marginalised enough that he didn’t ruin the film, but god could he kill a scene.
As is the same with all the other Pirate movies (with the possible exception of the first one) it starts off much stronger than it ends. That’s not to say the ending was actually bad, it’s just not as clever or funny as the introduction of Jack Sparrow or the mid story shenanigans, It’s just a fairly predictable clash of the various factions seeking the fountain of youth. In its defence though it seemed far less rushed than the ending of the last episode (though that may have been somewhat due to my ill considered consumption of various caffeinated beverages before going to see a film featuring lots of running water, if you catch my drift).
CONCLUSION TIME! Pirates 4 is probably the best one since the first one. It has all the bits you liked from the franchise and tries its best to cut out all the stuff everyone was complaining about. It’s funny, it’s stylish, it’s got magic and it makes as good a plot as it can while dealing with pirates discovering the fountain of youth, which is more than can be said of Pirates 3.
WATCH IT
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