Pirates Review

Pirates is a coming-of-age comedy where a group of teenagers celebrate New Year’s Eve during the Millennium and serves the Reggie Yates’ directional feature debut.

Two Tonne (Jordan Peters), Cappo (Elliot Edusah), and Kidda (Reda Elazouar) are friends who meet up for the first time since Cappo has gone to uni. Their plans for the Millennium get cemented when Too Tonne asks out Sophie (Kassius Nelson) and the trio have to get tickets for a New Year’s Eve party at one of London’s biggest clubs.

Pirates has a simple set-up for a coming-of-age story because it showed a group of 18-year-olds who have one last chance to hang out before they go their separate ways, even if they don’t realise it yet. It was a similar setup to Superbad, Blockers, and the end of The Inbetweeners as characters have to embark on the next stage of life. Plus, the boys and one girl were part of a rare set of people because their first New Year’s Eve as adults was an event that few could ever experience. It’s a shame Pirates was underwhelming.

There was plenty of comedy to be mined from the idea that a group of boys trying to get tickets for a sold-out event and act like animals trying to get a mate during the event. But Pirates came across as a sitcom episode stretched out to 80 minutes. The boys were able to get their tickets to the nightclub early in the film so the middle act was just watching them meander around until 11 at night. The boys go to the barbers, shoplift some new treads for the night, and face an aggressive owner of a takeaway.

Pirates was less of a story and more like watching the boys going from comedic set-piece to comedic set-piece. It was loosely stung together. The dramatic weight of the film came with Cappo wanting to quit as the group’s manager, but this plot device was left in the background. It didn’t have the force the filmmakers thought it would have. Many of the situations that were presented in the film felt overly manufactured and the stakes were low.

As a comedy Pirates was a mixed bag. There was an Inbetweeners quality to some of the humour because Pirates capture the friendship and cringy situations they got into. There was fun when Two Tonne got so excited that he couldn’t get his words out and his friends had to interpret his charades. They were teenage boys, they wanted to pull girls, have fun, and make fun of each other. Cappo’s yellow car felt like a reference to Simon’s Fiat in The Inbetweeners, although Cappo’s car was less embarrassing. The film did feel like The Inbetweeners episode “Night Out in London” because of its story and scenes of a yellow car driving around the capital. However, The Inbetweeners knew where to cut out the fat.

Other jokes fell flat. There were references to late ‘90s tech like Tamagotchis and Snake on Nokia phones which resulted in eye-rolling from older audience members, whilst younger ones were befuddled. Other set pieces failed to raise a chuckle which was a cardinal sin for a comedy.

Pirates was simply a mediocre comedy. It had a well-meaning message about friendship, but it was a lacklustre British flick.