There really isn’t any reason for a fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie to exist, other than guaranteed ticket sales and a boost to Johnny Depp’s flagging star. Still, as mindless special effects-driven entertainment go, “Dead Men Tell No Tales” was far from the worst the summer had to offer.
It’s pretty much more of the same: Depp stumbling about as Captain Jack Sparrow, the worst pirate in history; a CGI-enhanced villain, with Javier Bardem as Captain Salazar, an undead pirate hunter missing large chunks of his crucial anatomy; winsome youngsters in peril, in this case Kaya Scodelario and Brenton Thwaites; lots of swordplay and big action set-pieces; reprises from franchise alums Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, although the latter two are barely more than cameos.
The story is about… well, do you even need to know? As usual, it involves various forces chasing a MacGuffin, with most of the animosity aimed squarely at Sparrow.
Depp always has a lot of fun in this role, and the filmmakers keep things fresh with a look toward Sparrow’s youth -- with a little de-aging CGI help -- where we find out a little about how he became the drunken nincompoop he is. For instance, there actually is a reason behind all those little bits of jewelry and odds-and-ends he wears.
It’s undeniably a fun movie, as long as you’re willing to pull up oars on your brain and just coast with the giddy current.
Video bonus features are ample, cemented by a comprehensive making-of documentary that includes interviews with all the principle actors and crew members. There are also four deleted scenes, a photo diary by producer Jerry Bruckheimer and a blooper reel.
You’ll have to pay a few dollars more to get most of this stuff, as only a single featurette is included on the DVD version.
If you can keep the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie straight, your cinematic compass is keener than mine. They made four of them in nine years, then none for the last six, so they merge together in a dim fog of sameness.
I remember the first one seemed fresh because it was a typical big special effects summer action bonanza set apart by Johnny Depp’s dizzy, daffy turn as the addled Captain Jack Sparrow. He quickly supplanted the ostensible stars of the franchise, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, to the point they didn’t even appear in the last one, and only make brief cameos in the fifth edition, “Dead Men Tell No Tales.”
It’s more of the same: crazy stunt set-pieces, supernatural threats, a brief foray into town for robbing and wenching, a couple of rousing sea battles and whole lot of sozzled Jack stumbling through it all.
He’s the most inept hero of any movie franchise I can think of. Imagine Luke Skywalker being really clumsy, swinging his lightsaber around drunkenly and accidentally decapitating Ewoks left and right.
Javier Bardem is the newest villain as Captain Salazar, a former pirate hunter who’s missing part of his head, and all of his soul. The “Pirates” bad guys are defined more by their special effects than their characteristics, since they’re all undead or seeking immortality, despise Jack Sparrow and need him, one of his trinkets or a piece of lore from him to get what they want.
The effect for Salazar and his crew is pretty spectacular: they’re actually missing pieces of their bodies, as if parts of them have been erased. Salazar’s got no back of his head, his skin is cracked like old plaster and oozing blood, and his hair swirls in a ghostly nimbus around his head as if he’s underwater.
Some of his crew are missing arms, legs, even entire heads or chunks of their torsos. One guy appears to be just a shoulder and a hip.
The fresh new young faces are Kaya Scodelario and Brenton Thwaites as, respectively, Carina, a curious girl whose love of science keeps getting her branded a witch, and Henry Turner, the grown son of the Bloom and Knightley characters, and doesn’t that just make us all feel old. They get to spend the movie arguing and denying their obvious infatuation.
Geoffrey Rush turns up again as Captain Barbossa, who through the series has been a zombie, then just a human villain, then a privateer in service to the British crown, and now is just back to being a pirate again. He’s worried about Salazar cutting his fleet to shreds, so he decides to seek him to reach an accord and serve Jack’s head on a platter.
It’s a fun, giddy movie that only works if it doesn’t stop moving long enough for you to think about how the different pieces fit together. For instance, it’s weird that the local British officer (David Wenham) is hell-bent on executing Carina for supposedly being a witch, but is happy to recruit a real one (Golshifteh Farahani) to track down Sparrow.
A few moments that stand out: we learn the origin of all those quirky bits ‘n’ pieces that make up Jack’s accoutrements; some rotted shark carcasses get reanimated by Salazar and set to snapping; and a daring Carina doffs her stuffy long dress to swim to safety. “I saw her ankles!” Henry crows.
Co-directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg and screenwriter Jeff Nathanson keep things moving at a brisk pace, feeding Depp plenty of moments for his little woozy reactions and quips. Interestingly, if you think about the plot you realize you don’t really need Jack Sparrow to make it all work.
He’s the oddball bit of grease that keeps this pile of claptrap turning long after it had any business embarking on another voyage.
The “Great Man” (or Woman) genre of cinematic biography falls into two subcategories. One is about a person of great import who is already well known to us. “The Theory of Everything,” about physicist Stephen Hawking, is a recent example of this sort.
“The Man Who Knew Everything” is the other kind: a look at a person whose accomplishments are celebrated within their field but virtually unknown to laypersons. These movies face an additional storytelling challenge, since not only do they have to satisfactorily explore that person’s life, but also justify to us why we should sit through an entire movie about them.
I feel comfortable in guessing that Srinivasa Ramanujan is not a name that falls easily from your lips. Like me, most people don’t keep lists of brilliant theoretical mathematicians memorized – let alone ones from India who died nearly a century ago.
Dev Patel (“Slumdog Millionaire”) plays the gentle soul, a self-taught man with no formal education who emerged from Madras to become a Fellow at Cambridge University in England, where he collaborated with his prickly mentor, G.H. Hardy, played by Jeremy Irons.
This movie is essentially the tale of their relationship, as it very slowly evolves from teacher/student conflict to co-equal friendship based on respect. Each man has prodigious gifts and limitations, which they intermesh in a sort of combat that transforms into a dance.
This was a wise move by writer/director Matt Brown, whose only previous credit (“Ropewalk”) was 15 years ago. The audience is obviously not going to grasp even the faintest complexities of the sort of computations these men explored – prime numbers and partitions – especially since they are dealing in “pure” math without any attempt at practical applications.
Essentially, the filmmaker has to make us feel the importance of this work without understanding it. It’s a largely successful effort, as we focus on the men and not the hieroglyphic-like scratchings (to us) they make on chalkboards and in journals.
We first meet Ramanujan in his native country, where he struggles to find employment despite his brilliance. He finally attains a position of accounting clerk for a local businessman, which at least allows him to bring his new bride, Janaki (Devika Bhise), and his mother (Arundhati Nag) to come live with him. It is an arranged marriage, and the three cautiously negotiate a web of responsibilities and resentments strewn between them.
But he yearns to publish and make his theories known to the world, believing that every mathematical idea is an expression of his patron Hindu god. Eventually his work comes to the attention of Hardy, who brings him to England.
The transition is painful. Hardy, an academic with few friendships or conviviality, makes little attempt to get to know Ramanujan on a personal level. He repeatedly chides him to complete the proofs that will prove to other, less gifted mathematicians that his theories are valid. The younger man feels chastened and constrained by not being able to let his imagination run wild, and be acknowledged.
The cultural assimilation is also difficult. A strict vegetarian and devout man, Ramanujan essentially becomes a hermit who locks himself inside his room in Charnal Lane, his health becoming increasingly worse. Meanwhile, Hardy struggles to convince his hoity-toity peers to accept the prowess of his protégé.
Both actors do a wonderful job of exploring their characters, but Irons in particular manages to bring layers of nuance that perhaps are not located in any screenplay. He gives these little bobs of the head and a distracted stare that help us feel the isolation he endures, which is perhaps not so different from that experienced by his Indian student.
It’s tough to make a crusty old academic emotionally resonant, but Irons gives Hardy a sort of homely grace.
The romantic aspect of the tale is not so effective, as Ramanujan and his bride have to carry on a relationship separated by years and thousands of miles.
Ramanujan died at the age of 32, but his fantastical theories have been almost all been proven true and, according to the film’s postscript, are still being used today to understand the behavior of black holes. “The Man Who Knew Infinity” is an engaging portrait of a hidden genius.
Just a quick review; Nick is handling the main review over at The Film Yap, so make sure to swing over there to get the "official" take.
"The Raven" takes a bold and innovative concept and does a good, not great job of executing it onscreen. It's a fictitious account of poet Edgar Allan Poe's final days, mixing lots of plots and dark imagery from Poe's writing with an entirely modern-feeling whodunit involving a serial killer. The murderer is acting out killings from Poe's own stories, to taunt the writer into pursuing him.
Think "Seven" or "In the Line of Fire," with lots of poetry quotations.
The result is a Gothic thicket of black cloaks, pecking birds with blood on their beaks, R-rated gore and scowling men shouting at each other in Victorian lilt. It's all quite absurd, but certainly engaging, and features John Cusack in one of his best roles in years.
Cusack plays Poe as a mordant, bombastic man frustrated that his amazing talents -- he'll tell you how amazing they are -- have left him penniless and alone at the age of 40. He presents an aura of pure confidence to the rest of the world, but privately he laments "the dark and morbid melancholy that has followed me like a black dog all my life."
If you like that sort of dialogue, you'll get plenty more of it from the screenplay by Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare, which piles on the brooding mood with a frenetic plot of twists and turns. Plenty of them don't make much sense, but director James McTeigue ("V is for Vendetta") keeps things tripping along at such a brisk pace the audience won't have time to contemplate the film long enough to spot the holes.
Some other standout lines: His editor (Kevin McNally) says of Poe: "I believe God gave him a spark of genius and then extinguished it in misery." Poe quips that if he'd known his writing would have inspired such a terrible admirer, "I should have devoted more time to eroticism."
A fellow writer and literary adversary of Poe's who is captured by the killer and forced to face the swinging pendulum bellows, "I'm only a critic!!" And as things really get tense, Poe fumes of the killer, "Even his prose is barbaric!"
The mysterious killer abducts Poe's lady love, Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve), whose wealthy father (Brenda Gleeson) is none too happy about the attentions from the fantastically failed writer. The murderer leaves a wake of clues, and bodies, with the requirement that Poe write his version of the story as it's being created and publish it in the Baltimore newspaper where he works itinerantly.
"The Raven" is a semi-smart mashup, undeniably entertaining even as we realize that it is, at its core, entirely goofy.
The "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise long ago walked the plank of artistic semblance. After the daffy fun of the first flick, due mainly to Johnny Depp's, tipsy off-kilter take on pirate Jack Sparrow, the series quickly devolved into bloated CGI fests lacking any wit or reason for existence.
The fourth installment, "On Stranger Tides," doesn't do anything to change this score. But at least the story is somewhat comprehensible, and they keep the number of characters trackable.
Alas, new director Rob Marshall -- subbing out for Gore Verbinski -- doesn't have the same flair for action scenes. The sword fights and other set-pieces tend to be murky and disjointed.
Sparrow runs across an old enemy/lover, Angelica (Penélope Cruz), who turns out to be the daughter of legendary pirate Blackbeard (Ian McShane). At least that's what she's telling Blackbeard. Part of the meager enjoyment of this movie is discerning the intersecting lines of betrayal, as every major character is either actively conning or being conned by another.
The finish line is the veritable Fountain of Youth, which every king and scallywag wants for himself. Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) pops up again, having lost a leg but gained a writ of clemency from the British crown.
In the end, "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" is another fancy treasure chest filled with leaden doubloons.
The video release of this movie was handled oddly. It debuted on Blu-ray last month, but is only coming to DVD now. Video extras are rather scant on all versions except the most expensive one, the 3-D Blu-ray/DVD combo. That includes a feature-length commentary and a number of featurettes.
It's a disturbing trend, this idea that only those willing to shell out for the top-line edition deserve the goodies. It's this sort of thinking that is causing DVD sales to plunge, as more and more consumers would rather stream a quick fix than shell out for a disc package that contains few or no extras.
Movie: 2 stars out of four Extras: 2 stars out of four
"Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" is simultaneously more and less coherent than its three predecessors.
Compared to "Curse of the Black Pearl," "Dead Mine Chest" and ... alright, I confess I don't really even remember the titles that well, so utterly forgettable were they in their total embrace of popcorn movie aesthetics. Anyway, compared to the first trio of films, "Stranger Tides" at least has a story that is relatively comprehensible, and keeps its roster of main characters trimmed to a manageable level.
At the same time, new director Rob Marshall's action scenes are murky and hard to follow. (A largely useless 3-D version doesn't help.) Say what you will about Gore Verbinski's slick, soulless and heavily CGI-assisted escapades on land and sea, but the man knew how to stage a sword fight.
Marshall, known for musicals ("Chicago," "Nine"), just can't find the rhythm. He falls back on the tricks of the inept pretender, chopping the action into frenetic bits that don't really seem to fit together.
Johnny Depp is back as Captain Jack Sparrow, slurring his dialogue with more zest than ever. The novelty of the character had worn off after the first movie, but he's still plenty of fun to have around.
His main foil is a female pirate, Angelica, played by Penélope Cruz. She and Sparrow had a fling once upon a time, and he even confesses to having "stirrings" beyond a momentary debauch. Alas, his vagabond ways asserted themselves and he left her high and dry. Now she's back to make his life miserable, and/or stir the embers.
I liked that the movie allows Angelica to have a little scar on her face and a little snarl to her personality. The screenplay (by "Pirates" vets Ted Elliott and Terry Rossario) goes beyond rendering her as a damsel in distress who knows how to use a sword, and allows her character to have as much duplicity and questionable moral character as Sparrow.
Turns out Angelica is the daughter of the infamous Blackbeard (Ian McShane), who's after the Fountain of Youth that Sparrow holds a map to. Sparrow assumes that Angelica is simply conning the old pirate, and from the way he looks at her it's clear Blackbeard has had the same thought.
I admit to being rather disappointed with Blackbeard. He's got a magic sword that he can use to make his ship ensnare his enemies with rigging, but that hardly compares to the octopus-faced terror of Davy Jones or the skeletal undeath of Captain Barbossa. For all he's hyped up as the mother of evil piratry, Blackbeard just comes across as a grump with a curious tendency to let people live a lot longer than necessary.
Speaking of Barbossa, he's back again, played with a churlish twinkle by Geoffrey Rush, despite having been killed off once or twice. He's lost a leg but gained a writ of clemency from English King George in exchange for finding the Fountain before Blackbeard or the Spanish.
At 137 minutes, the movie is way longer than it needs to be, and several scenes bog down under the weight of their obligatory nature. For example, Keith Richards is trotted out again for a cameo as Sparrow's pirate daddy, with no more success than last time.
An extended sequence involving mermaids fares a little better, and the sea vixens are both magically alluring and terrifying. They can also, for some reason, shoot webs like Spider-Man.
Sam Claflin and Astrid Berges-Frisbey turn up as a young missionary aboard Blackbeard's ship and a mermaid with a conscious, who soon begins some inter-species romance. Like the now-departed Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley from the first "Pirates" flicks, they're pretty to look at, slightly dotty in their behavior and totally unnecessary to the plot.
Actually, now that I think of it that's a fair description of "On Stranger Tides" and the rest of the franchise: pretty, dotty and unnecessary.
