Captain Jack Sparrow elevated pirates from sport mascots to the mainstream.
With his funny accent and ability to run like an elderly woman, Johnny Depp’s character sanded the edges off a profession specializing in brutality and popularized a kid-friendly blockbuster series called Pirates of the Caribbean.
Now Aardman Animations tries to keep piracy fun and bouncy, but runs aground on a reef of realism that would’ve been better off covered by the tide.
Directed by Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt, The Pirates! Band of Misfits is a blend of Aardman’s classic character stop-motion animation combined with CGI scenery.
And while this look certainly primes the palate for comedy, the filmmakers followed a more cryptic chart.
Our Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) desires to win a Pirate of the Year Award. That brings a smile. But his quest is undertaken before a grim backdrop of actual pirate life.
In one scene, the Captain makes a number of dry satirical observations that were funny enough, but in the background his crew is dropping a lit keg of gunpowder onto a school of dolphins. The aquatic mammal pieces blown up on deck are later consumed with plantains and hardtack infested with weevils.
In what could’ve been a clever moment, the Captain and crew board the H.M.S. Beagle and meet Charles Darwin. However a crewman in the background battling dysentery mars this comedic setup.
At least Gilbert and Sullivan had their pirates singing. Here we are exposed to stop-motion characters patching sails for numbing minutes on end. Other tedious set-pieces center around the crew scraping barnacles off the hull, or else holding mock trials for unpopular sailors.
Faces distorted by sherry and gin, the sneering pirates find the proceedings hilarious, but not so audiences sipping diet soda while children ask, “Dad, what are they doing now?”
Deciding to accompany Darwin to London, the Pirate Captain’s vessel arrives in port as the surgeon amputates the leg of a man who broke his tibia falling off a mast. His screams echo out over the Thames as Pirate Captain and scientist exchange droll asides.
And I’ll skip over a series of dissolves showing a marooned pirate slowly perishing on a sandbar over several days.
There you have it. How will you spend your entertainment dollars?
I’m actually giving this movie two and a half stars for historical accuracy as well as several groundbreaking close-ups on the mouth of a pirate with scurvy.
Props to Martin Haughey for having the courage to take a credit as previs animator despite no one knowing what that is.
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