I was fortunate enough to win two tickets from Clothes on Film to a preview screening of Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides. The screening was at The Empire cinema in Leicester Square, London.

I’d never been to The Empire cinema, and boy was I impressed! The screen they showed the film in was HUGE. I think I could have fit my whole office block in twice, with room to spare. The photo really doesn’t do justice to how big it was.

Enough about how gigantic the theatre was. On to the review! HERE BE SPOILERS:

Pirates 4 follows Captain Jack Sparrow on his search for the Fountain of Youth. We’ve shed the sub plots of Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom, but kept a few of the other favourite faces. Gibbs the first mate returns as Jack’s foil, and Geoffrey Rush returns as Captain Barbosa. To replace the love story they brought in Penelope Cruz as Angelica and Ian McShane as Captain Blackbeard.

The film begins with Jack committing a usual crazy caper. I think they should rename the theme music of Pirates to “Jack does something clever”, since every time he does something crazy that works the music strikes up that familiar theme. But, I don’t mean that in a bad way, I still enjoyed seeing the clever and improbable ways Jack gets out of his situations.

We follow Jack from the opening scenes to an audience with King George and Captain Barbosa, who has gone pirate to privateer. Some further hijinks and we’re introduced to our female lead, Angelica. She and Jack have a lurid past, discussed briefly in a sword fight that was a little too similar to film one’s initial fight between Jack and Will, for my taste. I pity the stunt choreographer, there’s not much new you can do to top the last three films in terms of swordplay. Unless you add rhyming taunts like Monkey Island, but I digress… Continue reading