Pirates - Der Schatz des Königs

The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure is a wacky, high-octane swashbuckling adventure full of cartoonish action and silly gags. It is nothing we haven't seen before but has an entertaining infectious energy if you go along with it.

When I saw a brand new South Korean pirate movie on Netflix, I was immediately intrigued. Movies made at sea are rare and far between. Pirate movies are practically an endangered film genre. With its rising popularity around the world, I was doubly curious to see what a South Korean pirate movie would be like.

The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure is one wacky motion picture. Or in some ways, it may be easier to think of it as a live-action cartoon with attention-deficit disorder. The tone is part-cartoon, part-wuxia and part-historical epic; where whales swallow people and shoot them out of their blowholes... only to be saved by them slamming against a ship's sails.

Lead actor Kang Ha-neul's bandit screams his lines with big gaping laughs into the sky like a possessed cartoon character, or a younger Korean version of Toshiro Mifune from Seven Samurai. Lead actress Han Hyo-joo is the cool-headed captain leading her crew of misfits and fools. The villains, who are government officials and soldiers with stern faces, feel like they're in a more serious historical epic in a completely separate movie.

The fast-paced editing cutting between the three groups is like a pinball just bouncing around rapidfire. It is funny but also dizzying at times. Perhaps it is just South Korean humor, but international audiences may struggle with its constantly shifting tone. It hurts the film in its more serious and emotional moments, as it never fully grounds its drama.

A common gag in pirate films is the fragile morality between thieves. As we have seen previously in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, situations change and every character's motivations are changing and the crew eventually turns on each other and double-crosses one another in hilarious ways. The Pirates ultimately pulls off this central gag well and it was funny enough to keep me entertained.

I believe The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure will play well with kids and parents can certainly enjoy it with their children for its laughs. As for the adults, it's light harmless silly fun.

I'll keep it short:

If you're looking for a pirates movie with excellent production values and set designs, great visuals and camera work, some sillyness and funny (perhaps a little bit annoying) character dynamics, nice cast, good amount of fast-paced, comic book action, some historical period setting in South Korea and just get excellently entertained, then this movie is recommended for you.

Somewhere between Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark and a Screwball Comedy, this movie is a good watch.

Because of some back and forth time jumps in the storytelling that got me confused, some too silly silliness and some all too well known tropes, I've got to deduct some stars, but still: A highly entaining, greatly crafted action adventure comedy Pirates movie.

Recommended.

Silliness and action galore if that's what lights your fire. This forgoes some of the strengths I usually associate with Korean drama (deft plotting, strong rounded characters, great acting) and just about gets away with it. That's partly because it is not trying to be anything other than what it is: an action comedy. And both the action and the comedy scrape over the bar.

Not up to Korean standards. Good cast, but mediocre writing and sloppy directing with inexplicable scene shifts that break attention. It has a few enjoyable moments, but the first film with Son Yi Jin is far better.

This is what you end up with when you mix up the scripts of Pirates of the Caribbean with the 70s trash 'Monkey' (or the Water Margin, which was even more unfathomable). Somebody might be able to make some sense of this but I couldn't. It's overacted to the nth degree, which just gets tiresome; even Jim Carrey can't compete with range of idiot facial expressions on parade here.

For all that, it does have its charms, and managing to get to the end of it felt like a triumph of sorts. Not recommended, but not dismissed either.