"The Pirates! Band of Misfits"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

Dirty, mangy marauders angling for the top science prize in Britain, egotistical pirate ship captains vying to be “Pirate of the Year”, Charles Darwin bemoaning his lack of luck with women, and dodo birds hidden in voluminous beards: these are the makings of a great Claymation movie. “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” weds the absurd with, well, more of the absurd. So it makes perfect sense that this movie satisfies the itch to indulge in a bit of nonsense.

Pirates are scary. They are mean, crass, brutal and violent—the worst sort of people. Pirates take pleasure in the misery of others. They rob the poor and torture the sick. Pirates are no good at all. That, I suppose, is why The Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) and his crew are not very good at being pirates. Consider who is aboard. There is The Albino Pirate (Anton Yelchin), who dislikes danger, and The Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson), who is hardly fit for life on the bounding main. Then there is The Pirate Who Likes Sunsets and Kittens (Al Roker). No explanation needed. This crew is pathetic, and their leader—The Pirate Captain—is no exception. He is fun loving, kind and considerate—a sorry excuse for a pirate.

This is unfortunate, for The Pirate Captain covets the esteem of other pirate captains. And he feels that the only way to earn his peers’ respect is to win the prestigious “Pirate of the Year” award, which goes to the pirate who brings in the most booty, plunders the most ships, and boasts the most victims. The Pirate Captain wants it bad.

The Pirate Captain has never won “Pirate of the Year”, though. He tries. It’s just that The Pirate Captain never has any luck. The ships he commandeers are never the gold-laden trading vessels of his dreams. Rather, the only ships that The Pirate Captain can find are filled with penniless lepers, children, nudists, scientists, or the like.

So The Pirate Captain takes a different tack. After boarding a ship inhabited by none other than Charles Darwin (David Tennant), The Pirate Captain learns that his “parrot”, Polly, is actually a very rare species of bird that could earn him untold fame with the scientific community. So the second-rate pirate and his crew go to a London science conference in search of the respect they never found while pirating.

However, their plan quickly runs aground. The Pirate Captain finds himself fending off jealous scientists and heads of state, and at the same time, trying to prove to the pirating community that he really is a marauding master of oceanic villainy. The Pirate Captain has some choices. He can pay the price for notoriety—and what a steep price that turns out to be—or he can stay loyal to Polly and his loving crew, but remain a nobody.

“The Pirates: Band of Misfits” is as funny and clever as it sounds. This movie is never dull. The plot itself is pretty amusing, and if there are any points at which the story lags, an ample dose of wonderfully dry humor still hits the spot. Jokes about everything from peg legs and rotting limbs to girl scouts and the Queen of England provide the variety that is needed to keep viewers guessing.

This is the sort of movie that you would expect from the creators of “Wallace and Gromit” and “Chicken Run”; yet, somehow, these quick-witted Claymation adventures never get old. This may not be the best movie of its kind, but that is hardly a knock. “The Pirates: Band of Misfits” is plenty good.