Pirate Radio: Inexcusable Shipwreck

Pirate Radio is based in England in 1966 at a time when the government of the UK was thoroughly unamused by the rebellious nature of that new-fangled rock n' roll music. Fearing that it would lead impressionable British youth down the slippery slope of dancing, drinking and general rock-related debauchery, the BBC refused to air such rubbish, thus opening up a market for offshore pirate radio stations to broadcast from ships anchored in international waters. Awesome premise, innit?

But no. In spite of the fertile subject matter, Pirate Radio lists like semi-buoyant poop afloat in still waters, utterly wasting it's subject matter and the valuable movie-watching time of any viewer interested in the actual facts and personalities responsible for the days of offshore radio. Based on no ship in particular, no crew in particular and advertised as "inspired by true events", director Richard Curtis takes unnecessary liberties with a magnificent historic premise and thereby forces it to walk the plank. The film itself is fragmented and lumpy, the pacing so immediate that it doest allow any of the characters to develop naturally, thereby enabling their over-the-top-rail personalities to stumble and bounce ineffectively off one another like drunks in a bumper car pile-up. There is a great deal of emphasis placed on how these pirate radio stations influenced the masses in the UK, but is depicted dispassionately in cut after cut after unnecessary cut of supposedly ordinary citizens gathered around radios at work or at home and nothing more. There's no interaction between listeners and they're relegated to meaningless sidebars rather than the people for whom pirate radio was created.


The best part of the movie of course was the music. But even with the full compliment of songs already available for broadcast in 1966, the greatest offense Richard Curtis commits is his insistence upon including songs recorded AFTER the era he's supposed to be depicting. Some examples are easier to overlook than others: "The Wind Cries Mary" (The Jimi Hendrix Experience) and "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (Procol Harum) were released one year later in 1967, a small but still significant oversight. But the inclusion of Cat Stevens' "Father & Son" which didn't appear until 1970's Tea For the Tillerman is just bogus and anyone who knows better and is able to endure this dreadful film to the point in which the song appears will certainly be combating the ever-deafening drone of their bullshit alarm.


The truth is that to dissect the myriad of inaccuracies and ineptitude of the film's entirety would take longer than the actual run time. The only enduring truth within this film is that it stands as the worst work Philip Seymore Hoffman has ever appeared in. The harsh reality that not even he was able to bail enough water out of Pirate Radio to save it's crew or us, the helpless passengers, had me leaving the theater thinking that it was the worst picture I've sat through all year.