Don’t get me wrong, I love Aardman stop-motion films. Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbitt and Chicken Run are two of my all-time favourite animated films and I love all of the Wallace and Gromit shorts but Pirates! Band of Misfits doesn’t even come close to being as good as its predecessors.

Here is the basic plot from IMDB:

Pirate Captain sets out on a mission to defeat his rivals Black Bellamy and Cutlass Liz for the Pirate of the year Award. The quest takes Captain and his crew from the shores of Blood Island to the foggy streets of Victorian London.

One of the reasons why I loved Wallace and Gromit (who makes a blink and you miss it cameo right at the beginning of the film) and Chicken Run is how clever the humour was.

It was humour that adults and children could comprehend but here in Pirates! it was too juvenile for my taste. Maybe because Nick Park, the genius behind Wallace and Gromit wasn’t involved in the film at all but his partner Peter Lord.

The film is set in 1837 but is deliberately anachronistic with the Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) using 20th Century slang in one scene and Jane Austen appearing in another (she died in 1817). And the film features an elevator that I don’t think was around during that time.

And I thought it was a bit absurd to have Queen Victoria (an over the top Imelda Staunton) and Charles Darwin (David Tennant) as the villains of the film. Also, I was really hoping that the film would address more of the Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashley Jensen) but they didn’t.

The plot of the film, which included the Pirate Captain having to rescue his pet bird wasn’t enough to make me care for the characters. The movie moved sometimes at a really slow pace that I actually was falling asleep during some parts.

The only good thing about the film was the voice work done by Hugh Grant who was charming and witty as the Pirate Captain and I did like Martin Freeman as No. 2 or the Pirate with the Scarf. He was very earnest and the animators did a nice job at capturing Freeman’s overall look.

As for the 3D aspect of the film. Not worth it at all. No scenes stood out as being amazing in 3D.

I was hoping for another Wallace and Gromit but I felt I liked I was walking the plank after watching this movie.