Review No.114: The Pirates! in An Adventure with Scientists

So it's getting into summer holiday season which means that plenty of animation will be on the cards including a new Ice Age film and the latest from Pixar however I'm going to backtrack to a previous film that was released when the schools were out during Easter which is The Pirates! the latest film from Aardman Animation. The Pirates! in An Adventure with Scientists sees the team behind Wallace and Gromit spoof the high seas genre with Hugh Grant's pirate captain eager to be named pirate of the year after being ridiculed by his peers. Though respected among his crew The Pirate Captain, which is his real name, isn't very good at his job as he struggles to find any real booty or seize any ships that don't have nudists or ghosts on them. He sees his chance to get a prize after kidnapping Charles Darwin, voiced by David Tennant, who explains to him that his parrot Polly is in fact the last remaining dodo so the ship sets a course for London despite Queen Victoria having a hatred of all pirates. When there it becomes clear that Darwin isn't all he seems as he tries to kidnap Polly however The Pirate Captain succeeds in hiding her and then entering into the contest which he wins. However there is something more sinister behind Queen Victoria's want to get her hands on Polly and Darwin is eager to play along as he his completely in love with her.

Darwin's love for Victoria was one of my problems with The Pirates! film as I found there were too many plot strands to cover with a running time of only 80 minutes. Unlike previous full-length Aardman features Chicken Run and Curse of The Were-Rabbit which felt like proper films I found The Pirates! to be a lot more episodic because while it did have a basic plot structure it seemed to want to fit in too many different comic situations which for me ruined the overall narrative of the film. Another issue I had was the fact that it wasn't as funny as it should've been especially considering how many laughs the Wallace and Gromit films provided this just doesn't feel like it's in the same league as those early efforts. I'm not saying I didn't laugh at all there are some funny moments most of them involving Darwin's monkey Mr Bobo or the evil Queen Victoria's final speech in addition there are some farily amusing set pieces including an early one where The Pirate Captain attempts to rob various ships only to find that there is no treasure to be found on any of them. There is also a game voice cast who add a certain Britishness to the film especially Grant's boisterous Captain and Staunton's brittle Victoria. As you would expect from an Aardman film The Pirates! is extremely well-crafted as every scene brims with visual detail and the biggest strength of the film is definitely its animation it's just a shame that the story isn't as great as some of the other films that the company has produced have provided. I'll be surprised if this is the best animated film I'll see this year however I don't think I'll be that disappointed if it isn't and I just hoped for a little more from the company who'd bought us such great animated pleasures in the past.

Verdict: Wonderful animation and a game voice cast can't escape from the fact that this film isn't as funny or as perfectly-scripted as it should've been therefore I can only give it 7/10

Review No.18: The Decoy Bride

The thing with this blog is that I would watch films that I probably wouldn't have picked otherwise, Mercenaries is a case in point, and just like that film The Decoy Bride seems like a movie that would go straight to DVD. Maybe it's because it has some big names in there with David Tennant and Alice Eve playing a couple who are about to get married but she is constantly hounded by the press as she is one of the world's most famous actresses. To dissuade the paparazzi they travel to a small Hebiedean island which Tennant's author James previously wrote about although it turns out that he googled all of his research and never actually went there despite this book being what Lara fell in love with in in the first place. Lara's 'people', played by Ugly Betty's Michael Urie and screenwriter Sally Phillips, have to put together the dream castle that she imagined from the book but even then the press arrive so these two pick a local girl to become her decoy but surprise surprise these two end up married instead. This girl is Katie a girl whose returned to the island following a unsuccessful career on the mainland working on an online trouser magazine and finds herself the only unmarried female in a world with no young men left. You can then really make your own mind and join the dots to what happens next but the film does include a scene in which two deaf people dance to Tennant playing the bagpipes badly.

If that above scene is something you've always wanted to see then The Decoy Bride might be for you if not then there's very little going on here. This is by no means a bad film but the best compliment I can lavish upon it is that it is quite easy-going and uncomplicated. The thing I couldn't get past is that the two central characters are fairly unlikeable Katie is self-loathing and unmotivated while not very attentive to her dying mother while James has written a best-selling book by plagiarising most of his material. In fact the most likeable of the three leads is Eve's Lara who isn't the spoilt movie-star but rather a caring, poetic girl who helps one of the islanders live out her dream in fact The Decoy Bride would be better if James was escaping a woman who wasn't very likeable rather than this charming saint-like beautiful actress. The best parts are the comic agents played by Phillips and Urie the latter playing an approximation of his character Mark from Ugly Betty these two get all the asides and his campy nature lends itself well to a film that is fairly slow elsewhere. There is a lot of wasted talent though both James Fleet and Dylan Moran aren't on screen long enough and the natives of the island are all clichéd oddballs. So a romance between two characters who deserve each other and a comedy that made me smile but never laugh and I'm sure this is meant to be a great British romcom.

Verdict: For an average uncomplicated romcom it gets a standard 4/10