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| Cannon Film Distributors | Release Date: July 18, 1986 |
Starring:
Anthony Dawson, Cris Campion, Damien Thomas, David Kelly, Ferdy Mayne, Jacques Maury, Olu Jacobs, Richard Dieux, Tony Peck, Walter Matthau
Summary:
The adventures of pirate Captain Red and his first mate Frog.
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It's fun intermittently, but a bit of a stretch at two hours, and Matthau's Cockney accent is about as convincing as the rubber sharks. Perhaps the key to understanding what it's about lies in considering Polanski's displacement: of Polish extraction, exiled in Paris, faced with arrest should he return to the US. The only flag he could comfortably wrap himself in was the Jolly Roger.
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Pirates is pure Polanski, but it's unfortunately not good Polanski. Attempting to revamp the swashbuckler genre the way he parodied Dracula movies in "The Fearless Vampire Killers," he's produced an abstract action comedy so emotionally detached it's impossible to stay involved. [28 July 1986, p.70]
Pirates is a Roman Polanski grossout. There's a rat in the soup and urine in the bath water and corpses all over the place. There's slipping and sliding and colliding, stabbings, bludgeonings and tumbles from the mast. Nothing is left underdone except the hilarity, the one good excuse for such low-jinks on the high seas.
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Pirates hasn't got an ounce of excitement -- or at least it hasn't excited composer Philippe Sarde, whose score is the symphonic equivalent of Muzak and is rarely wedded to what we see on the screen. So what's left is a pricey playpen for Polanski's sense of perversity. [19 July 1986, p.G1]
Pirates is tedious round after tedious round of mutiny and rescue. Screen people are hanged and stabbed and garroted with great care, but there's nothing to put the audience out of its misery. [22 July 1986, p.5C]
Apr 22, 2021
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