Rated PG-13

It’s a great title, but maybe for another movie.

Somewhere locked deep in Disney’s vault, there is apparently a secret Pirate Codex that lays out, in great specificity, the elements required to construct and launch a proper “Pirates of the Caribbean” episode. In addition to cutlass-clanging, rope-swinging, rum-swilling and cross-dressing, prerequisites include (but are not limited to) marginalized protagonists, sidelined romance, mutually opposed villains, convoluted plot machinations, and a minumum of 20 extraneous minutes. By cleaving closely to that guidebook, these tides remain wholly familiar. Somewhere along the line, however, someone must have torn out the page that mentioned spark, surprise, inspiration and fun.

Following through on a promise at the end of the last picture—that Johnny Depp’s swaggery, staggery antihero and scalawag Captain Jack Sparrow would continue his boozy, vainglorious pursuit of immortality to the fabled Fountain of Youth—“On Stranger Tides” hauls many of the POC ingredients back onboard.

But, like a poorly mixed drink, it combines them in all the wrong proportions. The first and foremost example would be that Captain Jack (a fairly thankless character, really, whose chief calling card is a stalwart rejection of development) is thrust oddly to the first and foremost position. Jack’s role, by design, has always been that of the Loki, the Bugs Bunny, the Trickster who hassles the real heroes of the story into action. Centralizing this force throws everything out of whack, and it doesn’t help that the surrogates provided, here a missionary and a mermaid, are faceless listless lumps with virtually nothing to do. If they succeed at one surprise here, it may be that this pair is able to make us miss Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightly, and that’s no small task.

This is the first of the series to be based, albeit loosely, on a previously written story, the first to involve characters from actual history (though, to nitpick, the real Blackbeard, Edward Teach, here played by a grizzly Ian McShane dressed in full leather like a biker of the sea, died some 40 years before the period in which this movie takes place), and also the first to be directed by anyone other than Gore Verbinski. It all smacks of a great running out of ideas. Say what you might about Verbinski, but he at least seemed to have something to prove. “Chicago” director Rob Marshall takes the helm here, and, beyond a certain flair for choreographing sword fights as dance numbers, shows little understanding of the core material.

First of all, at no point does Jack have a boat or crew, so he’s not really a captain of anything. Also, there aren’t any actual pirates. Technically, these sailors are now privateers in service of the king. To make things still stupider, they’re not even in the Caribbean, instead moving in a very slow, straight line from London to Florida. The real crime may be that, once making shore, roughly 75 percent of the film takes place on dry land (though some points are earned for the number of ways contrived to provide Captain Jack with ropes to swing on even after leaving the ships behind). There’s a certain Rube Goldberg level of stunt work that has come to be a hallmark of these flicks, but Marshall brings little invention to his shenanigans, allowing in most cases for the swelling, boisterous (and thoroughly recycled) Hans Zimmer score to be the only indication that the action onscreen is supposed to be, well, action.

Some of the best and worst stories are those that allow a conversation with the audience, but it’s a challenging tightrope-walk to get it right. Something may be said for “giving ’em what they want,” but a mob is rarely a great judge of what’s best for them. There’s a vast difference between giving an audience what it wants, what it expects, and what it deserves. It bears notice that when another famous supporting character of entertainment history, one Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, was brought to center stage by audience command, the most lasting result was that it gave the world the term “jumping the shark.”