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But people get incredibly resourceful whenever music is involved, and pirate radio broadcasting outfits were soon born. Sure enough, these broadcasters were pirates in every sense of the word. They installed radio towers on boats and anchored them in international waters off the coast of Britain. Broadcasting in the shortwave band, they ran their stations as ad-supported, commercial enterprises and eventually garnered tens of millions of listeners.
And so writer/director Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually) takes this tiny germ of a setting and crafts a movie around it. His script is as straightforward as they come: Eight DJs literally rock the boat, creating an Animal House-like atmosphere as they pull pranks, get high, and bed an endless procession of women who are ferried out to their location. As with any good frat-house comedy, there's a villain: In this case, Kenneth Branagh playing the greasy-haired Dean Wormer role of G-man Sir Alistair Dormandy, who wants nothing more than (wait for it) to shut down these blasted pirate radio stations.
Curtis's tale hits every stereotype and expected plot point imaginable. The too-cool womanizing DJ (Rhys Ifans). The man with enough respectability to keep the enterprise afloat (Bill Nighy). The hapless nerd who's lucky to get the time of day from a girl (Chris O'Dowd, so good in BBC's The IT Crowd). The American (Philip Seymour Hoffman, experiencing Almost Famous déjà vu). And of course there's the coming-of-age portion of the film, which is largely structured around the arrival of Carl (Tom Sturridge) and his subsequent experiences on the ship, sent to the boat by his mother after he's kicked out of school for smoking.
Pirate Radio is filled with charming vignettes. Alas, so much of it feels like phony filler -- all goofy stunts meant to fill enough time to pad the movie out to feature length. One DJ pulls a stunt to help Carl lose his virginity (doesn't work). A game of chicken culminates in a climb up the ship's mast. A wedding goes painfully awry. I won't spoil the ending, but it ends the way all good boat movies must.
Meanwhile we have to deal with alternating scenes back on shore as the stiff-lipped Dormandy yells at his staff to find a way to shut down the pirate radio stations. These scenes are such a buzzkill that Curtis has to resort to cheap gags to give them life, like giving one of Dormandy's operatives the surname of 'Twatt.'
Pirate Radio is a film that is defined fully by the word 'cute,' mostly entertaining and inoffensive and often quite funny, though over-long by at least half an hour. It's unfortunate that it feels so repetitive and reminiscent of many a film you'll have seen before -- including several of Curtis's own prior works. But hey, that's the movies. And rock 'n' roll, too.
Aka The Boat That Rocked.
