Not a comedy classic, but not as bad as some have said

Rating: 7/10 (15 April 2010)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
18 year old Carl (Tom Sturridge) is sent aboard a boat by his mother after a drugs incident, in the hope it will straighten him out. This, as we find out, is a big mistake, as her old friend Quenten (Bill Nighy) a free spirited, anti establishment figure and the boat is in fact a pirate radio station that transmits pop music to Britain 24-7, while the government gives it just a half hour slot every week. There's a host of colourful characters on board, including American shock jock The Count (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), cruelly funny Dave (Nick Frost) and recently returned from a drugs tour of America, Gavin (Rhys Ifans.) But grumpy, joyless government minister Sir Normandy (Kenneth Brannagh) has been assigned the task of bringing them all down, threatening to destroy their fun loving, free spirited world once and for all...
For a film where the plot is really quite a secondary thing, that was quite some summary. Not to say there's anything to think quite too deeply about it, there's just a lot of characters set to a colourful beat. On first glance, TBTR seems like a happy clappy, insufferably cheery 'Brit rom com' and in many ways it is. But this feature which Richard Curtis has written and directed isn't quite as torturous for non aficenados as it would seem. It does manage to be genuinely funny here and there, with decent characters with well cast actors to play them and a superb soundtrack that captures the mood and spirit of the era wonderfully. One notable complaint would be that it's slightly, well, massively overlong, culminating with what seems like a subtle in joke/p!ss take of Titanic which shows how overblown it's become. But if you're into the sort of films I'm usually into, this will be a welcome change and a film you won't regret seeing. ***