Pirates

It’s New Year’s Eve in Lon­don. The year is 1999. Google is some­thing we’ve bare­ly heard of. Tam­agotchis are some­thing we all still care about. Three best friends are try­ing to break into the music scene through pirate radio and embark on a mis­sion to see in the new mil­len­ni­um in style. It’s a sim­ple premise that forms the back­bone of Reg­gie Yates’ fea­ture debut, Pirates, yet the film has all the ingre­di­ents to become a British classic.

Cap­po (Elliot Edusah), Two Tonne (Jor­dan Peters) and Kid­da (Reda Ela­zouar) have a sol­id agen­da of ​‘Tekken and tit­ties’ to see in the new year, before Two Tonne’s infat­u­a­tion with local girl Sophie (Kas­sius Nel­son) caus­es him to promise her the ulti­mate night out. Cook­ing up a scheme to get into the Twice as Nice Y2K par­ty at the leg­endary Club Colos­se­um, it’s a race against time to secure tick­ets and a kiss by mid­night. With Cappo’s tiny, bright yel­low Peu­geot as the dream machine, the boys set off on a series of mad­cap errands and misadventures.

Trans­port­ing the audi­ence on a fun-filled throw­back to both the ​’90s and young adult­hood in gen­er­al, Yates pays homage to London’s rich garage her­itage (have fun spot­ting all the cameos from leg­ends of the genre), deft­ly deploy­ing a thump­ing sound­track of clas­sics that are impos­si­ble not to sing along to. Through his infec­tious­ly like­able and tal­ent­ed pro­tag­o­nists, Yates’ rol­lick­ing dia­logue cap­tures the bril­liance of youth in all its bold fool­ish­ness and earnestness.

His direc­to­r­i­al style is as joy­ous as his writ­ing, and we’re intro­duced to the Pirates through the unmis­tak­able sounds of ​‘Dooms Night’ by Azz­i­do Da Bass accom­pa­ny­ing cuts of the trio clown­ing around in front of a red and white swirling back­drop. This zany open­ing is the pre­cur­sor to a fea­ture that fore­grounds the vibrant and the celebratory.

Aside from the humour, Yates also suc­ceeds in real­is­ing the world of these teenagers so truth­ful­ly that their grow­ing pains are acute­ly felt, despite our adult selves know­ing these ten­sions to be large­ly incon­se­quen­tial. This in fact cre­ates a han­ker­ing for a time when such juve­nile prob­lems took the place of the ²⁴⁄₇ dig­i­tal tor­rent of glob­al issues we’re now so attuned to.

At one point in the film, a char­ac­ter ref­er­ences Lon­don by say­ing, ​“We’re not stuck here, we’re from here”. In mak­ing Pirates, Yates has stat­ed his inten­tion to show the lives of Black youth with a nar­ra­tive oth­er than the more preva­lent depic­tions involv­ing crime or hard­ship. With fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion being giv­en to the pres­ence (or lack there­of ) and por­tray­al of Black peo­ple on screen since the Great Enlight­en­ing of sum­mer 2020, Pirates arrives as the per­fect tonic.