Running Time: 1 hour, 28 minutes
Rating: PG
Director: Peter Lord
Quick Impressions:
I’m just going to have to face it—nothing will ever be as funny as Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. How fondly I recall the afternoon that my husband (then my boyfriend) and I mistakenly stumbled on that movie! We were trying (for some reason) to watch Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist (which is, as I discovered on a later viewing, the antithesis of enjoyable), but we went to the wrong theater by mistake and salvaged the situation by watching Wallace & Gromit on a whim.
I’ve really given up on ever repeating that felix culpa. (The closest I’ve ever come is coming down with a violent stomach bug during the previews before Borat and missing the movie entirely. After I finally saw it the week later, suddenly spending 48 hours glued to the toilet no longer seemed like the worst thing in the world.) (Appologies to Sacha Baren Cohen. You’re great as King Julian in the Madagascar movies, and you have a lovely wife.)
Anyway, my point is that while I always enjoy Aardman movies, the studio has never equaled its stunning achievement with the Oscar winning and hilarious Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and I begin to despair that it ever will.
Still, Pirates! Band of Misfits is engaging and enjoyable. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny (to be honest, I think I actually laughed exactly once), but it’s the kind of thing you watch with a persistent smile, and definitely the sort of movie you can re-watch countless times, each time catching something new and clever in the background.
The movie’s humor reminded me a lot of Monty Python, except it’s not as funny as Monty Python, either. Still the increasing absurdity of the situations depicted evokes—if not laughs—a certain amount of awe. Some really wacky, crazy stuff happens in this movie. Anytime you’re being attacked by Queen Victoria, rapidly approaching on a tidal wave of baking soda, you know you’re in the territory of the absurd. This movie does absurd extremely well, but going into details feels unethical since the trailers reveal so little about the actual plot.
Based on the previews, I really did not anticipate the fairly major twist that gets the actual plot of the movie going in earnest. I don’t think I should spoil it. But had I known that the movie was based on a book called The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists, maybe I wouldn’t have been quite as surprised by the way things went.
I’ve always found Hugh Grant strangely engaging, and he’s pretty winning as the Pirate Captain. The chemistry between him and Martin Freeman (voicing the second-in-command Pirate with a Scarf) is excellent (especially considering that they probably didn’t record the voices together). David Tennant and Imelda Staunton are marvelous, too. So the movie benefits from good acting by performers with compelling voices.
Even though you don’t laugh as often as the movie would like, it’s hard not to feel for the oft befuddled Pirate Captain and his unhappy scientist frenemy. And young children (like my three-year-old daughter) are likely to become quite invested in the fate of Polly. The stakes are actually pretty darn high for an animated comedy as far as Polly is concerned.
But, you know, maybe this really isn’t a comedy, after all. It’s more like a quirky adventure with comical moments.
Best Recurring Joke:
Most of the humor in this is weird rather than laugh-out-loud hilarious. It’s the sort of thing seems destined to develop a (small) cult following. (I can definitely imagine a certain kind of adolescent boy waxing poetic about “ham night,” for example.)
A number of the jokes in the movie recur as the film builds momentum for its (literally explosive) final act. I think the best of these involve The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate and “his” beard although the monkey butler’s cards are pretty great, too and the pirates’ ability to disguise themselves consistently drew smiles (if not the boisterous laughs filmmakers seemed to hope for).
Best Action Sequence:
How can anyone resist a monkey dressed up like Mr. Hyde? (That may not have been what he was going for, but that’s what I thought of immediately.) Honestly, I think if you didn’t worry about spoilers, this movie would be more fun to write about than it was to watch (certainly funnier). What I’ll refer to as “the bath tub chase scene” really made me wish that we had watched it in 3D. I think the 3D would have lent a winning energy to an already madcap scene. (But my daughter won’t wear the glasses.) Something in that scene actually made me laugh, too, but I forget now what it was.
Best Scene:
Even though I really liked the part with the whale early on, I think the best scene is the final confrontation/rescue. Imelda Staunton really is pretty awesome as Queen Victoria, and the whole idea of the scene is so bizarre that you can’t help being drawn in.
Most Needless Affront to Queen Elizabeth I:
Fans of Queen Victoria should definitely bring their senses of humor. [Fake Spoiler Alert] This is not the most flattering portrayal of England’s longest reigning monarch (for now—that QE2 is a hardy one).
(Full disclosure—I’m obsessed with Elizabeth and know almost nothing about Victoria. But surely she said something memorable in all those sixty-three years on the throne! Of all the monarchs who came in contact with pirates, surely Elizabeth I is least worthy of their calumny! I mean, she knighted Francis Drake!)
The Funniest Thing in the Movie:
The lyrics of the song “I’m Not Crying” by Flight of the Conchords. I don’t think the song was written just for the movie, though, because it seems like I’ve heard it before. (But I could be wrong.)
The Negatives:
All around me, I kept hearing little children softly begging to go home. Hardly anyone laughed. At one point, my daughter climbed into my lap and groaned, “This is taking forever!”
I don’t know if you could say that the pacing was off, but the story felt slow, and the movie (for all its skewed sense of humor) wasn’t actually very funny. Most of the funniest things weren’t for children. I don’t mean that the movie is crude or full of that kind of “adult” humor, just that lots of the jokes come in the form of stuff written in the background, or off-hand comments that will go over children’s heads.
Overall:
I enjoyed Pirates! Band of Misfits, but it is one of the least funny comedies I’ve seen in years. However (and this is a big however), just because it wasn’t funny doesn’t mean it wasn’t entertaining. It had winning characters, quite a bit of action, and some delightfully absurd moments. As a rousing adventure, it’s pretty good (except that it’s not rousing). But it is quality work that adults will enjoy and children will tolerate. (Judging from what I overheard, most kids did like the monkey and the bird.)