Movie Reviews: "The Pirates! Band of Misfits"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: The Pirates! Band of Misfits


The unlikely winner of the award for best-reviewed movie of the weekend is Aardman Animation’s The Pirates! Band of Misfits.





Of the major critics, only Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel sends it to the plank.

“Amusing in small doses, Pirates is the first Aardman film to suffer a serious shortage of sight gags, the first where the whimsy feels forced and the strain shows,” he huffs.





You have to wonder if Moore saw the same film as the Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips, who calls it “maniacally inventive.”

He goes on to write that hours after seeing it, “I was smiling at the memory of the best bits, some so fleeting they practically dare an audience to catch them on the fly.”





Or Tom Russo in the Boston Globe who writes similarly:

“There’s so much going on, often so subtly, you may want to sail with this crew more than once.”





Likewise Nell Minow in the Chicago Sun-Times:

“The wonderful folks at Aardman have created another deliriously silly stop-motion animation delight, filled with giddy pleasures and so many witty details flying by that you wish for a pause button.”





Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times simply calls the movie:

“a clever piece of business that is a complete pleasure to experience.”





Linda Barnard in the Toronto Star assures readers that while the filmmakers at Aardman do employ computer effects “to play backup,” fans of the Wallace & Gromit TV shows and movies, and the Chicken Run and Arthur Christmas features, should rest easy.

“This marriage doesn’t scupper Aardman’s classic clay-based animated heritage,and the script is still filled with the kind of dry laughs only the Brits can conjure up.”





Elizabeth Weitzman of the New York Daily News took two little girls with her to the press screening, who, she says, “made this heartfelt request as soon as it ended: ‘Please please please give this movie five stars!!!”

She wound up giving the movie three, “But I can say that most 5 and 7-year-olds are likely to have the same response they did.”

Adults, she says, are likely to have “a rollicking good time, even if Aardman’s ambitions don’t quite dazzle as usual.”





But Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, ordinarily one of the toughest critics on the block, seems completely won over by the filmmakers.

“The movie is a curiosity cabinet of visual pleasures, but so breezy and lightly funny that you may not realize at first how good it is. (You’re too busy grinning.)”

-IMDB News