A few hours ago it would have been hard to imagine the possibility of a dull
movie with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh, and Bill
Nighy; but then I went to “Pirate Radio.” This is a movie with a nearly bullet
proof premise: it is 1966 and the BBC has declared Rock music immoral. That
doesn’t sit well with Quentin (Bill Nighy), a snappy sophisticate who comes up
with a plan. He will broadcast all 24 hours of each day from a refitted tanker
ship off the coast of England in the North Sea. He will feed rock music from his
floating juke box to 25 million pop-starved Britons. And the best part of all
this is that it actually happened. That’s a tough premise to mess up, but this
gang of filmmakers manages to do it.
We meet a
handsome young boy named Carl (Tom Sturridge) who has been sent aboard ship to
his godfather Quentin by his mother for safekeeping as punishment for his
teenaged misbehavior. A teenage rebel of minor proportions has been sentenced to
a term in Animal House on the sea. Contained in this ship of delinquent D.J.s is
as uninteresting a group of characters as you are likely to meet in any movie
this year.
Phillip
Seymour Hoffman plays a slothful American hired by Quentin as ship’s captain; he
seems for a moment to be the one who will wring the laughs from the crew as dorm
mother. What happens instead is that the demented crew members turn into
fraternity house inmates who, when not on duty at the beloved transmitter, think
and talk only about sex and farting. Some pretty good movies have dealt with
those subjects recently – usually starring Seth Rogen – and they have been funny
because they have either plots or great characters. A movie can work without one
of those, but not without both.
We have here
the young virgin boy, the overweight lunk who fancies himself a stud, the
lesbian crew member, the idealist, and a few others who easily escape my mind at
the moment. None of them is connected in any funny or appealing way with any of
the others. They connect only with a boatload of girls delivered for an
afternoon of personal indulgence, moldy jokes, and fraternal clichés.
Kenneth
Branagh plays Sir Alistair Dormandy, the government leader of the reprisal force
who is determined to shut the ship down even if he has to sink it. Emma Thompson
enlivens things by arriving, seaborne, in a splendid array of clothes and
gestures.
Finally, as
if in desperation at their own failure to draw laughter, the filmmakers create a
scene straight out of 1942 Dunkirk along with an ocean catastrophe that produces
as much noise and wave action as “Titanic.” If the movie had been either funny
or appealing, we would have cheered the Dunkirkian rescue; but it wasn’t, and we
didn’t.
Copyright (c) Illusion