Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

The Pirates Blu-ray Movie Review

Call them fish meal.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 17, 2015

Say what you will about Captain Ahab (get in line behind Ishmael, please), at least he never had to deal with pirates—at least not as far as we know, anyway. No, Ahab’s singular pursuit of the most iconic whale in American (and maybe all) literature was marked by mental imbalance and various things like crew discontent and even stormy weather, but at least no one had to worry about being pillaged. Rather incredibly The Pirates, a formulaic but sporadically entertaining 2014 South Korean opus, manages to work in a quest for a whale within an overall story of a female pirate and the supposed founding of the Joseon Dynasty. The film is wildly all over the place from a tonal standpoint, trafficking through everything from slo-mo martial arts sequences to goofy physical humor, sometimes within the same brief sequence, and its alternately whimsical and deadly serious approaches may make it a somewhat difficult slog for Western audiences who want their action-adventure swashbucklers delivered either straight with no comedic chaser, or flat out cartoonish on the other end of the spectrum (which brings to mind another film with a similar moniker, The Pirates! Band of Misfits in 3D). The film is big, noisy, rather glossy and always fun to watch, but its narrative arc is hackneyed, despite the unusual whale angle, and a lot of vignettes sprinkled throughout a somewhat bloated running time seem to be there simply to tick off the requisite boxes marked “explosions,” “swordplay,” and the like, rather than emerging organically from a well told story.

In 1388 a battle for power is evidently brewing (something that will probably be more well known to Koreans or those with a background in Asian history than to the general populace). A low level grunt named Jang Sa-Jung (Kim Nam-gil) has the audacity to question Yi Seong-gye (Lee Dae-yeon), his general, whose decision to forsake the battlefield to get back to the seat of power and supposedly replace the existing king with a coup rankles Jang's sense of honor and duty. The first of several hyperbolic sword fights breaks out, with Jang slightly injured but the victor, nonetheless. He is, however, obviously now an outcast and putative bandit.

Meanwhile at sea there are pirates, including nefarious leader So-ma (Lee Geung-young), who quickly shows his female underling Yeo- wol (Son Ye-jin) how to deal with uncooperative captives (hint: it doesn’t include letting them live). So-ma manages to uncover a cache of little golden Buddha statues, but one of them is dropped into the ocean as the booty is being transported back to the pirate ship. A quick thinking Yeo-wol jumps into the water and manages to snatch the icon before it’s lost forever, but in so doing she comes face to face with a gigantic whale with a mysterious cross like scar on its side.

With these competing storylines properly set up, the action finally segues forward three years to find Yi now firmly in charge of everything, but booty still getting inexplicably lost. This time it’s something a bit more important than a mere (if valuable) golden Buddha statue. A royal seal from the Ming Dynasty which will legitimize Yi’s rule goes overboard in a sea disaster and is promptly swallowed by a whale. A bit of subterfuge is engaged in, since evidently some Koreans of this time period don’t even know what a whale is, and others are not willing to fess up to the fact that such an improbable occurrence has transpired. A secret quest to track down the whale, with a sizable reward attached, leads competing interests to start taking off on an Ahab-esque mission.

It probably goes without saying that soon enough that Jang (who adopts a “bandit name” of Crazy Tiger) and Yeo-wol are thrown together as adversaries in pursuit of the same prize, and that furthermore Jang decides that Yeo-wol herself is probably the prize most worth pursuing. There’s the requisite amount of banter between these two would be nemeses-lovers, but it’s delivered in haphazard little increments in between some odd if enjoyable enough set pieces. In fact the film seems almost brazen in how it just shoehorns in seemingly unrelated production elements that simply bring whatever faltering narrative momentum there is to a screeching halt.

Also tending to distract are a number of juvenile comedic elements, including a running gag (emphasis on gag) of a seasick pirate who is more often than not shown vomiting over the side of the ship (the eagle eyed can catch this activity in one of the screenshots accompanying this review, if they're so inclined). It’s this tonal disconnect that will probably prove to be the hardest thing to swallow (so to speak) for some audience members. The Pirates never quite seems to know where it wants to go, pausing here for a moment of slapstick, there for a kinetic piece of action, and there for a supposedly weighty character beat, with no organic knitting together of these disparate elements. Like a lot of pirates, maybe these seafaring searchers would have done better with a well marked treasure map.

The Pirates Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Pirates is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Whatever the lurching qualities of the script, from a purely visual perspective, The Pirates offers a largely consistent and pleasing experience in high definition. Clarity and sharpness are both excellent, and whether aided and abetted by a bit of CGI or not, some of the exterior footage boasts astounding depth of field (see screenshot 3 for just one example). Though variously color graded to both the ever popular yellow and/or blue sides of things, the overall palette throughout the film is gorgeously varied and very nicely saturated. Fine detail is often resplendent on the intricately woven fabrics of some of the costumes. The CGI is occasionally problematic in the underwater sequences, and in fact about the only noticeably anomaly here is some slight but apparent banding in those underwater moments.

The Pirates Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Pirates lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (in the original Korean, with optional English subtitles) is a suitably exuberant affair, filled to the brim with well done sound effects and foley elements, most of which are placed very smartly throughout the surround channels. The mix can get a bit heavy handed at times, with a lot of competing elements along with sometimes frenetic levels of dialogue, but for the most part prioritization is very well handled (and there are those aforementioned subtitles for the dialogue elements, anyway). An especially fulsome low range helps to support some of the bigger action set pieces. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is similarly very wide and enjoyable throughout this problem free track.

The Pirates Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 2:09)

The Pirates Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Pirates can't quite muster up the power to segue seamlessly from schtick laden comedy to more straight ahead action and narrative elements, but the film is relentlessly breathless and never less than entertaining. Some of the aspects are cliché ridden, to say the least, but the film takes a kind of winking, self deprecating approach that makes the hoary tropes a little less grating than they might otherwise be. The physical production is quite stupendously sumptuous and helps to distract from some of the narrative and tonal hiccups. Technical merits on this release are very strong, and even without anything worth shouting about in the supplements section, The Pirates comes Recommended.