The Fourth One
I watched the first Pirates in 2003 and remember being surprised by how weird Johnny Depp was allowed to be. The whole thing moved like something half-sunk, all excess and randomness, and it shouldn’t have worked but it did. Two more sequels followed and by 2007 it felt like the series had reached its natural stopping point. Then Disney made another one.
This time the object is the Fountain of Youth. Penélope Cruz plays the romantic interest (Keira and Orlando are gone), and the plot hits every beat from the previous three. Sword fight. Betrayal. A ship. A magical MacGuffin. Depp swaying and making weird faces. Barbossa showing up. Keith Richards in a pointless cameo. It’s technically competent, which is almost worse than if it were openly bad, because it means someone was comfortable with just repeating themselves.
The fourth Pirates isn’t a failure. It’s the feeling of watching a photocopy of a photocopy. The first three had something because Depp and whoever was writing seemed to be discovering the character as they went. This feels like someone filling in a template. The effects are bigger, the budget is bigger, the expectations are clearly bigger. But there’s no actual spark. Just the same moves executed with more money.
Without Keira and Orlando, something shifts in the dynamic that this movie doesn’t acknowledge. They provided counterbalance—characters you could believe in, reasons to care whether any of this mattered. Without them it’s just Depp and Cruz on a ship, and Cruz is capable, but she’s a different kind of presence. The whole thing plays wrong without that anchor to something resembling normalcy.
Depp’s still the only thing worth watching. He commits to being the weirdest presence in every frame in a way that’s almost generous—he’s really giving you the strangeness, the physicality, the commitment to not making sense. But even his full commitment can’t quite overcome the fact that I’ve already watched this. Three times over. I don’t need to watch it again.
The trilogy didn’t need to continue. It ended at a place where you could walk away satisfied. A fourth movie feels like the moment a band puts out a reunion album that nobody asked for—technically competent, financially sensible, spiritually empty. Once something becomes a formula, it’s done, even if they make ten more. Pirates became a machine that prints money, and machines don’t get weird. They just repeat themselves in slightly different lighting.