Movie review: “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” (VIDEO)

Someone must have dared the makers of “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” to dream up a swashbuckling adventure more bizarre than the entire “Pirates of the Caribbean” series.

They succeeded.

Sure, the Johnny Depp films have zombies and ghosts and krakens, but they don’t have Queen Victoria conspiring with Charles Darwin to steal a not-quite-extinct bird from a gullible pirate captain named The Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant).

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“Band of Misfits” is Aardman Animations’ first stop-motion feature since 2005’s “Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” so within animation circles, this has been a highly anticipated movie. Perhaps that long absence has made the Aardman crew too eager to please, especially the American audience, because while “Band of Misfits” is certainly funny – it contains several sequences of marvelously sustained comedy – its overall storytelling is too frantic, too needy.

It lacks the relaxed confidence of director Peter Lord’s previous big-screen feature, “Chicken Run,” which started with a clever idea (a chicken coop as a World War II prison camp) then found a perfect balance of story, character and gags. The jittery “Band of Misfits” follows a strange idea with oddly juxtaposed characters, and is more a catalogue of pirate jokes than a story. That doesn’t make it bad, just a bit off the mark for a studio that has hit so many bullseyes.

Writer Gideon Defoe adapted the script from his own “The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists,” the first in a series of comic novels (which, by the way, are not children’s books). Clearly influenced by Monty Python and Douglas Adams, and possibly influenced by Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next mysteries, Defoe swings from absurdism to satire to farce to juvenile humor.

Grant’s Pirate Captain leads a crew who have character descriptions for names, from his first mate, The Pirate With a Scarf (Martin Freeman), to The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashley Jensen), a woman disguised with an orange wool beard. Their tale takes place in 1837, which is about 150 years after the true era of Caribbean pirates, but much of the film’s humor is rooted in anachronisms, so just go with it.

The Pirate Captain is no terror of the seas. The reward for his capture is 12 doubloons and a free pen. To restore his bad name and win Pirate of the Year, he resolves to plunder every ship his crew spies. This leads to an ill-fated series of raids that culminates in the capture of the Beagle and its famous passenger, Charles Darwin (former “Doctor Who” star David Tennant).

The prisoner realizes the Pirate Captain already has a great treasure, because Darwin instantly sees that the captain’s “big-boned” chicken, Polly, is the last surviving dodo. He persuades the captain to sail to London to present Polly in the Royal Science Academy’s annual pageant (awards shows take a real ribbing in this movie). When greedy Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) sees the dodo, she has a more ghastly plan for the bird.

Victoria is presented as a full-on Bond villain, which is the weirdest historical quirk in a movie built on them. This characterization is more baffling than funny, but it does generate a fair share of laughs. However, a joke with Jane Austen dissing the Elephant Man is unnecessarily cruel. I suppose any joke at the Elephant Man’s expense would be.

“Band of Misfits” is filled with the zany, Rube Goldberg-inspired action sequences that have been Aardman’s hallmark since the train chase in the seminal Wallace and Gromit short, “The Wrong Trousers.” The highlight here is the accidental destruction of Darwin’s London home by a runaway bathtub, wherein The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate maintains her cover despite being naked.

The mix of stop-motion and computer animation is more noticeable here than in the previous Aardman films. For the most part, though, the computer animation is used in the same way CGI effects are used in live-action films, for naval battles, explosions, flying whales, etc.

By itself, the stop-motion animation is the most sophisticated that Aardman’s artists, the masters of the form, have yet achieved. The range of facial expressions is unprecedented, and the sheer number of miniature sets, and the details they contain, boggles the mind.

Yet the process remains charmingly old-fashioned. The animators’ fingerprints occasionally appear in the characters’ Plasticine features, and the join lines between their features sometimes show.

In his debut as an animation voice actor, Grant strikes all the right notes of muddled bravado as the daft but determined Pirate Captain. One of his lines, “It’s only impossible if you stop to think about it!” ought to be preserved on an inspirational poster. The British cast impresses overall, because they excel at acting with their voices over there.

That is why the voices of Jeremy Piven and Salma Hayak, who play rival captains vying for the Pirate of the Year booty, are so grating. They obviously were cast to make the movie more appealing to American audiences, but they sound out of place.

The character who just about steals the movie doesn’t speak at all. He is Mr. Bobo, Darwin’s monocled chimpanzee valet who communicates with flash cards. His comic timing with the cards is exquisite.

It is disconcerting to hear Darwin frequently refer to Mr. Bobo as a monkey, not an ape, but “Band of Misfits” presents the father of evolution as a dodo brain in more ways than one. Creationists will adore this movie, so long as they don’t idolize Queen Victoria.

* Jeffrey Westhoff writes movie reviews for the Northwest Herald. Email him at sidetracks@nwherald.com.

“The Pirates! Band of Misfits”
3 stars
Rated PG for mild action, rude humor and some language
Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes
Who’s in it: Voices of Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, David Tennant, Imelda Staunton
What’s it about: A crew of bungling pirates raids Charles Darwin’s research ship, the Beagle, and they all wind up heading to London to present the Pirate Captain’s (Grant) pet dodo to the Royal Science Academy. When the nefarious Queen Victoria sees the bird, she has other plans for it. This film may not be historically accurate.