Rob Marshall trims the cast, keeps Johnny Depp and delivers one good chase and one properly frightening attack by mermaids. Between them lies a great deal of walking, and a film that has stopped being strange and settled for being long.
The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film arrives with a new director in Rob Marshall and a smaller cast: the young lovers from the earlier films have gone. What remains is Johnny Depp, and the question the film cannot avoid is whether Jack Sparrow can carry 136 minutes on his own. He cannot, and it is not entirely his fault. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio’s screenplay, drawn from a Tim Powers novel, sends everyone after the Fountain of Youth, and the journey is mostly a walk.
The London opening is the liveliest stretch. Marshall can move bodies through a room; the escape from the palace, Jack swinging on a chandelier and then riding the roof of a carriage through the streets, has a lightness the film never finds again. Penny Rose puts Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa in a privateer’s coat and a powdered wig. Richard Griffiths has one scene as King George.
Depp is the difficulty, and the film seems to know it. The sway, the fluttering hands, the swerve into another subject halfway through a sentence: these are a routine now, and there is nobody here for them to bounce off. He is the plot now, and a running gag asked to carry a story starts to look like effort. Penélope Cruz helps. She plays Angelica as a woman who has heard every line before, and their duel in a London tavern, all feints and insults, is the closest the two of them get to chemistry.
Ian McShane is the best thing in it and is given the least to do. His Blackbeard is quiet, weary and casually cruel, and McShane delivers each threat as if reading it off a menu. John Myhre’s ship for Blackbeard, black-hulled, a skeleton at the bow, rigging that tightens on its own when Blackbeard draws his sword, is the one place the film feels haunted. Then the script leaves him on deck while other people go and fetch things. Sam Claflin’s missionary Philip and Astrid Berges-Frisbey’s mermaid Syrena are handed a romance meant to be the heart of the film, and it plays as a pause in it.
The mermaids are the other reason to watch. Marshall stages their arrival at night in a bay: one figure surfaces beside a rowing boat and sings, then there are more of them, and then the water turns on the sailors. For ten minutes we were frightened, in a 12A about pirates, because Dariusz Wolski lights the bay so that the faces under the surface are visible only when they choose to be, and Wyatt Smith and David Brenner hold each cut until the last possible moment. It is the one sequence in which the film remembers that the sea is dangerous.
Then it is back to the jungle, and the jungle is dark. Wolski shoots much of the second half at night or under canopy, and on screen it is brown and grey and hard to read, with the swordfights disappearing into the murk. Hans Zimmer’s score keeps striking up the familiar theme, as if to reassure us it is still the same franchise, and we came to resent it. We were bored on the trek to the fountain, and then irritated at being bored, because a film about eternal life ought to have some idea of what a minute is worth. The last act takes a turn we will not describe.
The first film in the series was a surprise: a film from a theme-park ride that turned out to have wit and a proper ghost story. Its sequels grew heavy. This one is lighter and less strange, and lightness is only worth having if it comes with speed, which here it does not. Most critics landed around where we have, and we see no reason to argue with them. Watch it for the tavern and the mermaids, and keep the remote to hand for the jungle.
