The Pirates

The Piraty ROSSMAN

Remember the Pirates of the Caribbean movies? The ones with Johnny Depp as the crazy pirate captain who has crazy adventures on the high seas set in an era long past? The ones with lots of sword fights, great music, lots of betrayal, and a giant squid that eats people? Yeah, those movies. Remember them? 'Cause the South Koreans do, and they just made their own hugely-budgeted rip-off of those Depp films, only the Koreans forgot the fun. (I will only say that a rip-off is a "tribute" to a previous work if it's a good flick... This movie, the super-imaginatively named The Pirates, is not.)

I'm rather annoyed that I sat through this entire flaccid turd of a flick. I knew it was a stinker about 20 minutes in, but I just had to see it through for some masochistic reason. It tried its damnedest to mirror the over-the-top awesomeness of the original PotC movies, but it just didn't seem to understand what made them so enjoyable in the first place.

The Pirates has a ton of main characters (both good and dickish), but the two main "good" guys (one a pirate queen called Yeo-wol, and one a bandit king called Jang Sa-jung) are rather boring, conventional, and overall bland. The bad guys are the same (dull, dull, dull), but the evil government dickish lackey at least has a rugged eye-patch, and the naughty-bad pirate has Mike Tyson-like face tattoos... So they have that going for them. which is nice... Well, comparatively.

The plot of this thing is nothing new too. Granted, originality seems to be overrated for most movies nowadays, but there was never a time that I felt anything remotely close to shock, happiness, or thrills while watching this Korean crapfest; and without any real emotion a blah movie will just sink like an anchor into the soft silt of shitty storytelling.

The Pirates is an odd turtle-duckling (not to mention that its name is as lame as the tale and characters within); It's a period piece that takes place at the birth of the Joseon Dynasty wherein a betrayal from most high leads to the fall of the previous Korean Dynasty, but just as China sends its official royal Seal of State to the new Korean ruler (granting him the right to rule under the new name), the ship carrying it to the conquered capital is sunk by a giant whale, and that whale then swallows the majestic box holding the seal because that's what whales do in shitty movies.

The politicians and Navy officials are all scared for their lives if the Emperor finds out the truth, so they lie and say that pirates stole the seal... Why this is any better I have no idea (especially since a whale is a fucking force of nature, and the Navy ship carrying the seal should have been able to ward off a pack of pirates). Anyway, the emperor gives everybody 2 weeks to get the seal back so he can begin to officially rule (once again, pre-internet days, where news takes months if not years to get anywhere, why is there such a tiny time-frame to find these "pirates" on the open sea?), and so evil eye-patch guy is set loose to get it. Eye-patch is told the truth about the whale, and so he and his newly-bestowed-upon-him Navy go a-huntin'.

Eye-patch then enlists pirate queen Yeo-wol (who had previously overthrown pirate king Tyson-tattoo), to scour the seas looking for the whale (which turns out to be a whale friend of hers from when she was a child [please don't ask]), but an ex-subordinate of Eye-patch who fled the armed forces when "betrayal" became the word of the day (that would be Jang Sa-jung, the mountain bandit) gets wind of the treasure in the whale, and with one of Tyson-tattoo's ex flunkies he commandeers one of Eye-patch's ships and goes off to hunt for the seal too. The supposed humor from this thing comes from the fact that *Chuckle!!!!* Jang Sa-jung knows NOTHING about sailing or marine life *BWA HA HA HA!!! So funny!*

No. It's not funny. It's sad. It's like a shitty cartoon aimed at toddlers who don't know how to turn off the TV.

Anyway, everybody (pirate queen, bandit king, Eye-patch, and Tyson-tattoo, and all their crews) meets up, starts fighting, then the whale miraculously shows up and they all fight to get the seal from it or to save it because it's their friend.... Then the bad guys get blown up in a kind of lame explosion, and everybody is happy... Except the whale. Which died.

Oh, then Jang Sa-jung, the bandit king, suddenly becomes a super fucking ninja warrior, and he sneaks into the Emperor's bed chamber at night like a whisper, and he tells his lord "Okay, so it wasn't pirates that stole your seal, it was a whale. Call off the death note on all pirates, yo!" And the next day the Emperor is all like, "Hey, bitches! You lied to me, but I don't care. We'll just tell the Chinese Emperor that the super special seal got lost. What's he gonna do? Oh, and we'll send him less maidens and eunuchs too and make him renegotiate his terms... Why the fuck not?"

The end.

No, I'm not shitting you, that's how it ends.

I want to forget this whole thing ever happened.... Goddammit, South Korea, you are soooo much better than this.

So, what did I think of The Pirates? It was pretty goddamn awful. Not the worst thing I've ever seen, but it's probably the lamest South Korean big flick I've ever sat through. I give it only 1 out of 11 Pirate Chests of Bootay. Watch a good Korean movie like I Saw the Devil instead.

The Pirate-Hatin' WOLFMAN

How in the hell can you make a movie featuring pirates and giant sea battles and killer whales boring? Well, firstly I guess you hire actors who can only "act" with one look on their face. That look being "Bored." That's what pissed me off the most: that hot chick they got to play that lead pirate lady, she was bored shitless with being in this thing, and so, by proxy, so was I.

Secondly, the plot was lame and I wanted to punch myself to knock myself out in order to stop having to watch it. Every character was so fucking STUPID. I felt like that karate instructor in "Weird Al's" UHF, I just wanted to yell out "YOU SO STUPIIIIIID! STUUUUUUPIIIIIIIIIIIID!" I wanted to hit every stupid character over the head with a mop until they either became less stupid or died.

Finally, well shit... Aren't "boring and retarded" enough reasons not to watch this thing? It sucked. Enough said. Jesus....

It sucked. I hated it. I want my two hours of life back. The end.

JOHNNY DEPP

I've got to say, of all the Pirate of the Caribbean movie rip-offs I've ever seen, this was the shittiest, my friend. Hell, even that p0rn they did a few years back had better special effects, a better plot, and more ta-tas. I think it was called "Bangin' on the Caribbean" or something... Or maybe that's just what I called my last vacation that I filmed with my mistress... That video will be released if I ever stop making $20million per film, by the way.

So, this pirate movie didn't star me, just had a bunch of sourpuss Koreans in it (NOT THAT all Koreans are sourpusses, just the ones in this movie... And in all of North Korea), and I think it was supposed to emphasize saving the whales or some-such horseshit. No squid-man, no afterlife sequence filled with multitudes of my clones, and no peanut. This movie had nothing going for it.

This movie was awful. Why not watch Mortdecai instead!