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Home - Film
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Bon Montage
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Pirate Radio sets sail
on a love bloat
by Ryan Syrek
You know what’s fun about watching people listen to the radio? Nothing. No wonder, then, that writer/director Richard Curtis’s Pirate Radio sinks before it leaves port. This attempted love letter to ’60s-era rock reads more like a demented ransom note composed by half-wits and Ritalin junkies. The opening sequence, indistinguishable in every way from a trailer for the movie, initiates what could be the first 135-minute montage in cinematic history. Effervescent but stupid, it’s as if you’ve walked into a party with bitchin’ music where everyone is pretending to have a good time but really just wants to go home.
Originally titled The Boat That Rocked overseas, the film retells the lapse in judgment of our jolly British friends, as their stiff-upper-lipped radio stations refused to play more than a half-hour of rock ‘n’ roll each day during the ’60s, which, you know, just so happened to be the prime days of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. This gave rise to rock broadcasts from various boats anchored in the North Sea, broadcasts tuned in by more than half of the British population. Compelling? Well, it could have been, had Curtis not decided to populate his fictional vessel with escapees from a mental institution.
Philip Seymour Hoffman leads a potent and criminally underused cast as The Count, who is basically Wolfman Jack without the howl and any definable personality. He is joined on air by various whackjobs, including Dave (Nick Frost), a near sex addict; Simon (Chris O’Dowd), a lovelorn awkward turtle; Angus (Rhys Darby), an ambiguously sexual weirdo; Gavin (Rhys Ifans), a narcissist who dresses like a pimp and Bob (Ralph Brown), a burned-out hippie. Their station, Radio Rock, is run by Quentin (Bill Nighy), whose godson, Carl (Tom Sturridge), is brought aboard for reasons that would ruin the third act. These characters stand exactly as revealed in the brief descriptors above, as they do after more than two hours.
What counts as conflict boils down to Sir Alistair Dormandy, played by the delightfully hammy Kenneth Branagh, attempting to shut down the station with the help of his sidekick Twatt (Jack Davenport) — whose unfortunate moniker is a joke exploited no less than a dozen times. Branagh’s mustachioed Domandy plays like a British Hitler (a Britler?), and he receives the lion’s share of the laughter not derived from jokes about sex or poop.
Curtis, who flawlessly nailed the ensemble comedy with both Love Actually and Notting Hill, is at war with himself here; he simultaneously desires to show how revolutionary this programming was (with near-constant reaction shots of British common folk listening along) while delivering broad-based laughs. Throw in some truly bizarre subplots involving confused paternity and sex partner swapping and you get an overlong hot mess that is never boring but never outright compelling.
It’s easy to see how this film sounded like a really good idea at the time, but so does Taco Bell at 2:30 a.m., and just like that late-night “run for the border,” Pirate Radio leaves you feeling overstuffed and full of regret.
GRADE: C-
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