Review: Pirate Radio

Just a few days back Robert Carlyle used the Scottish BAFTAs as a platform to voice his displeasure of the British film industry. There have been no decent films produced here, he said, since Trainspotting.

Studying Carlyle’s words, he has a point; the cinematic output of Great Britain primarily regurtiates the same type of film over and over. Chief amongst them are the kitchen sink tragedy and the costume drama. However, there is a third type of high profile movie produced on these shores which generally lead to much commercial success. This genre can be, for all intents and purposes, attributed to one man. This, the third entry into the British cinema canon, is the “Richard Curtis movie”.

Since graduating from television writing, Curtis has pioneered an individualistic approach to the world of cinema relying heavily on picture postcard locations in Southern England, syrupy sentiment, “comedy” swearing and middle-class males indulging in linguistic mishaps. Bumblecore, if you will.

The unexpected worldwide smash of his script Four Weddings And A Funeral secured Curtis free reign on his career to pretty much do as he pleased. And, since the Four Weddings formula proved so successful, Curtis has pleased himself in trying to repeat its success over and over with variations on the same theme – heightened British stereotypes, shoe-horning solitary Americans into plots, over-literal musical cues and a complete lack of subtext or ambiguity.

Pirate Radio, released in the UK as The Boat That Rocked, is Curtis’ latest and his second project as a director after the saccharine schmaltz-fest that was Love, Actually. The film, set in the 1960s, focuses on a band of “boys at sea” – the non-conformist DJs who broadcast the latest, coolest pop records from a pirate radio station aboard a boat just off the coast of England. At the time the BBC dedicated only a tiny fraction of air time to playing popular records and, as commercial radio was yet to take off, pirate radio provided the only chance to hear these exciting new singles. As such the merry band of rebels aboard Radio Rock are considered deities by many of the young Brits eager to hear these glorious new sounds. One person who is quite the antithesis of a fan though is Kenneth Branagh’s character, Sir Alistair Dormandy. The scheming authority figure has made it his mission to shut the pirate radio station down and rid the airwaves of what he considers filth.

What little narrative there is concerns Carl, the boat’s newest arrival, attempting to lose his virginity to one of the hordes of girls who are allowed on the ship intermittently as groupies. Other than this, there is little to no thread that runs through the spine of the movie; the narrative is disjointed and more of a series of vignettes than a focused attempt at creating a singular tale. Rather than concern himself too heavily with the notion of plot, Curtis has instead crafted a personal love letter to the records of his youth and, as such, at points the film gives the appearance of a series of back to back music promo videos.

Whilst not as mawkish as the rest of his oeuvre, Curtis is still guilty of making a number of film crimes by reverting back to a number of his cinematic bad habits.
Replete with comedy swearing – an F-bomb is dropped on live radio, a character is called Twatt – Pirate Radio offers not only unsteady direction but also the single worst use of a Cat Stevens song in film history. It would be safe to say Richard Curtis is no Hal Ashby.

Thankfully, it would seem, Curtis is by far the least talented man associated with this film and, through excellent turns by most of the huge cast, there is a small amount of treasure to be gleaned from Pirate Radio. Like Love, Actually the ensemble cast is large enough for no one actor to be given the chance to fully round out their character in a poorly written script. Yet the sheer force of personality by several of the actors makes the film transcend from merely bearable to something resembling enjoyable for small swaths of the movie. Whilst Rhys Darby, known for his turn as Murray in Flight Of The Concords, would have little trouble raising a chuckle with the most intolerable of scripts (see The Yes Man for proof), and Philip Seymour Hoffman is never less than superb in anything, the real star of the show is Irish actor Chris O’Dowd. After gaining rave notices for his turn in the TV sit-com The IT Crowd, O’Dowd has attempted to branch out into films and, with any luck or justice, should be a star in the making. With the right project he could certainly be a break-out star – unfortunately neither this nor Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, his science fiction comedy from earlier this year, have provided the right platform.

As the film concludes, the sheer will of the actors to create something palatable, something with a modicum of gravitas, is brought tumbling down by a conclusion that shows that Curtis clearly suffers from some form of idiocy. As the ending states the fates of all the shipmates, one final caption informs the audience rock and roll has done okay for itself since the 1960s. This statement is matched, non-ironically with an image of the cover of the Black Eyed Peas Elephunk.