• By JOHN WIRT
• Movie critic
• Published: Nov 20, 2009

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After ruling Britain’s airwaves for decades, the mighty BBC suddenly faced competition in the 1960s when renegade radio stations began broadcasting from ships anchored offshore.

Pirate Radio, a comedy from Richard Curtis, the writer-director responsible for previous Brit comedies Love Actually, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’ Diary, celebrates Britain’s broadcast pirates with a fictionalized tale of a merry band of deejays who enjoy defying the establishment nearly as much as they revel in the debauchery that regularly occurs aboard their radio-tower equipped ship.

Curtis’ pirate radio vessel is a party boat, in tune with free-wheeling ’60s sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Frankly, it’s all too much. On screen, at least, the disc jockey characters are less entertaining than they imagine themselves to be within their own ego-tripping heads.

But Pirate Radio has its charms, including a perfectly placed Leonard Cohen song. The film’s music supervisor, its director or whomever, also showed good taste by including Baton Rouge rock ’n’ roll star John Fred’s “Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)” and New Orleans rhythm-and-blues great Aaron Neville’s “Tell It Like It Is” in the hit-filled soundtrack.

Writer-director Curtis bases the plot around two conflicts, one a barely developed skirmish between rival pirate-radio disc jockeys and the other, a far more significant challenge, from the British government.

Getting wind of pirate radio and its filthy rock and pop music, Kenneth Branagh’s highly placed Sir Alistair Dormandy goes off his nut. Of course, he prefers the classics. These pirate radio jocks obviously are a gang of drug-takers, rude boys with low morals, contributors to the further decline of the until-recently-great Britain. Pirate radio must be scuttled.

Sporting period spectacles and proper conservative suit and haircut as Sir Alistair, Branagh definitely looks the part.

The actor’s huffing, puffing and angry indignation hit the bulls-eye time and time again. Yet Branagh’s spot-on performance can’t compensate for Curtis’ stereotypical characterization. The same goes for the appealing but slimly written radio pirate crew, all of whom are neatly molded types, including Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Count, the ship’s lone Yank; Bill Nighy’s nattily uniformed, always look on the bright side of life station manager, Quentin; and Rhys Ifans’ ultra-cool broadcasting legend, Gavin. And, accurate or not, the film’s weary old David vs. Goliath plot fails to launch.

Too much a fawning love letter to pirate radio and too little an account of a commercial and cultural phenomenon, Pirate Radio, even if it doesn’t run completely aground, misses its cues.