Pirates 4: on stranger tides

Who can blame Johnny Depp for making another Pirates of the Caribbean? On Stranger Tides is the third sequel (2011) in a franchise that's transformed an offbeat indie actor into a Hollywood stalwart. Let him make his pension while he can, collecting a reported US$55 million for headlining such a bad blockbuster.

If only he was really a modern-day Errol Flynn, with the power to veto the appointment of plodding Rob (Chicago, Geisha, Nine) Marshall as the replacement director for the series' imaginative creator, Gore Verbinski. Obviously, sadly, Depp could not argue with executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Walt Disney Studios, and the pair of writers (Ted Elliott and Terry Russio) who'd concocted the initial trilogy based on the Disney theme park ride and became executive producers too.

This time, with Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley having wisely walked away from their tired format, the screenplay mechanics tinkered with ideas from an optioned 2009 pirate novel. The only major character to stay aboard their latest creaking craft was devilishly-wicked ludicrously-bewigged Geoffrey Rush as peg-legged Captain Hector Barbossa. He and Depp's comically-camp macho-mincing Captain Jack Sparrow have become a heavily-mascara-ed pseudo-comic odd couple. Without them, the franchise would be meaningless; with them, it's barely forgivable.

Joining them on the truly sketchy storyboard is Penelope Cruz as Sparrow's former lover, and daughter of infamous Blackbeard (Ian McShane wasted in a role the champion scenery-chewer was clearly instructed to understate, lest he out-ham the Depp-Rush combo). Cruz also gets a load of make-up, and even the movie's ageing Hollywood production committees must have realised they were launching a ship of relatively old piratic fools.

Seniors are surely a growing movie-going demographic segment. Why else have Keith Richards re-appear self-teasingly and pointlessly with his wrinkled face and upper-crusty English accent, and insultingly ask Judi Dench to take a teeny cameo as a dowager wowed by a kiss from Sparrow. There is also a grumpy chorus of elderly English actors playing court to a puffed-up Richard Griffiths as King George II.

Therefore, per basic market research principles, they added a pious young English missionary (tick for Middle America demographics), tied to the main mast so that he can meet and exchange eye-watering devotion with a young mermaid (tick teen market). Their badly-written poorly-acted relationship looks and sounds like a leaky band-aid stuck on the plot, an attempt to inject a couple of drips from a fountain of youth into a geriatric movie.

Even its SFX are feeble, and rarely humorous or arresting. A truckload of blazing coal and school of man-eating mermaids were cute ideas inadequately visualised, and the overall lack of explosive visual magic, exciting pace and thrilling sounds is a nagging reminder how action-adventures used to be made for Indiana Jones, James Bond and even Caribbean pirates.

The frequency of dimly-lit night scenes also deprives the film of lighting effectiveness, and a 2D screening offered no hints when and why the movie's 3D format would be worth watching. Hans Zimmer's basic music theme is more noticeable - and irritating, repeated excessively as a noisy background substitute during unimpressive scenes of supposed action.

Occasional pun-ishing word-plays and double-entrendres encourage audiences to listen harder, in the hope that deeper ideas or characterisations, or just some wittier verbal crudities, might be found by the attentive. A foolish hope, akin to expecting Bruckheimer to nurture a once-delightful fantasy into Bond-like immortality.

He and Disney were rightly nervous, following the below-par earnings of Pirates 3, reducing the budget from US$300 million (Pirates 3) to US$200 million. That largely explains why the film is cheapskate non-entertainment. One hopes Depp's retirement fund is now large enough for Captain Jack to sail off to oblivion.