blah "feel-good" comedy

Rating: 4/10 (5 January 2011)

With a tone that is 180 degrees off from the subject it is chronicling, the soft and cuddly "Pirate Radio" appeals more to the wistful nostalgia of its aging, baby-boomer audience than to the spirit of teenaged rebellion that defined their youth.
The movie takes place in 1966, that moment in time when an entire generation of young people had begun revolting against everything their uptight elders stood for - with rock'n'roll as the one indispensable and unifying force in the movement, giving voice to all those feelings. And considering that much of this musical iconoclasm was emanating from England itself - in the form of the British Invasion - it's rather astonishing to note that rock music could be broadcast for only a single hour a day on British radio at that time. That is until a handful of anarchic DJs came up with the idea of floating boats out to sea, far from the reach of the censors and the law, and spinning the discs from there. The result became known as "pirate radio," a thorn-in-the-side for the morality-police in the government but an indispensable listening sensation for the millions of dedicated fans who tuned in on a regular basis.
"Pirate Radio" takes us aboard a fictional ship called Radio Rock to provide us with a behind-the-scenes look at the station, but writer/director Richard Curtis hasn't come up with a storyline or a set of characters worthy of his subject. The nominal protagonist is Carl (Tom Sturridge), a 17-year-old virgin whose mother (Emma Thompson) has sent him to the boat to spend time with his godfather, Quentin (Bill Nighy), the head of the operation (obvious shades of "Almost Famous" in the setup). Carl gets to hook up with all the others on the boat, including Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a smug American DJ who goes by the moniker The Chief. The trouble is that, despite all their assorted eccentricities, none of these people are particularly interesting as characters or convincing as rebels, so we're left with little to engage us beyond the snippets of all those amazing songs from the era that are constantly being played over the action.
Even worse is the "villain" of the piece, government minister Sir Alistair Dormandy, hammily played by Kenneth Branaugh, who's made it his life's work to not only see that the station is shut down permanently but to make it a crime even to be caught LISTENING to the station, let alone running it. Since Dormandy never becomes anything more than just a crude caricature of an uptight, petty bureaucrat, the dockside scenes are even less engaging than all the goofy hijinks and antics playing out on the high seas. Moreover, the humor lacks the starchiness and brittleness one generally associates with the best of British comedy. And, in what would appear to be one of those bizarre inverse laws of physics, the more "Pirate Radio" strives to be a "feel-good" experience, the less good it feels.
Things really go awry when Curtis turns the whole thing into a mini-"Titanic" in the closing stretches, a plot device that converts Dormandy from a pompous elitist snob into a heartless monster. But no matter, for by that time we've already had just about all the self-congratulatory smugness and self-conscious cutesiness we can stand in a single sitting. And what could have been a slashing satire about changing social mores and anti-establishment, youthful rebellion turns instead into a safe, middlebrow and comfy little heart-warmer designed to put a smile on our faces and a spring in our step - which is the very last thing a movie dedicated to the spirit of rock'n'roll should ever be.