Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES (2011) - June 13, 2011
Oh, the humanity.  About the quest to find the fountain of youth, embarked upon by Jack Sparrow as well as a few other groups of pirates, this was... well, it was less convoluted than the first two sequels, I will give it that.  Other than that?  Not so good.  It actually started out decently enough, with some decent action revolving around Johnny Depp escaping from the British, but it was all downhill from there.  One of the main problems here is that Jack Sparrow just doesn't work as the main character of a movie.  He just wants to traipse around and have a good time, which is well and good but it makes for a pretty much worthless protagonist.  None of the other characters fare much better; I don't know who thought it was a good idea to have a film in which the protagonists are all a bunch of pirates with foggy motivations, but it really doesn't work, at least not in this movie.  There is an effort to introduce a new straight-man character, who has a love interest (albiet a thinly-drawn one) and who is obviously supposed to recall Orlando Bloom from the first few films -- but he's given so little to do that his stuff just feels like a pointless diversion.  Rob Marshall's stylelessly workmanlike direction is basically fine, but what this movie really needed was someone to infuse it with some life and energy, which Marshall completely fails to do.  It's pretty boring.  *1/2