The latest feature to emerge from Britain?s Aardman Productions workshop, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, succeeds in spite of a faint but persistent sense of factory settings and finishes. Following their partnership with Sony Animation for last year?s computer animated Arthur Christmas, Aardman (whose co-founder, Peter Lord, directs here, along with Jeff Newitt) has returned to the stop-motion claymation that helped build the company name. It?s a strange thing, knowing that a movie was literally handmade and still feeling it is vulnerable to the glaze of mass-farmed entertainment.
The story, adapted from the first two installments of a children?s serial by Gideon Defoe (who also wrote the screenplay), is the first source of this feeling. It?s 1837, and we meet the garrulous Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant, dining on his dialogue with impeccable form) as he resolves to enter an annual Pirate of the Year contest somewhere in the West Indies. Pirate Captain leads a ship of holy fools, each one sillier and more plainly named than the next. There is The Albino Pirate (Anton Yelchin), The Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson), and The Pirate with a Scarf (Martin Freeman), among others. Pirate Captain?s rivals are announced with fanfare: Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven), the brash American, Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek), the Jamaican cutthroat, and Peg Leg Hastings (Lenny Henry), the... peg legged one.
It?s all rather casual — not unengaging, exactly, but lacking a narrative energy all its own. Flashy introductions are made, but the set-up feels like that of a franchise coasting through its third or fourth installment. Pirate Captain cuts an inglorious figure?he lacks looting and pillaging chops but desperately seeks the validation of his co-pirates, who see him as something of a tragic clown. The Pirate with a Scarf plays ego-fluffer, insisting that real piracy isn?t…
Chelsea Handler Cheryl Burke China Chow Chloë Sevigny Christina Aguilera Christina Applegate Christina DaRe Christina Milian
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