<em>The Boat That Rocked</em> until you were sick into your own hands

Arguably, The Boat That Rocked is a change of direction for writer, director and all-round spectacle wearer Richard Curtis. Instead of a nauseating tale about love (Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell, the only woman in the world to sport two wooden eyes, in Four Weddings And A Funeral; Hugh Grant and walking advert for teeth Julia Roberts in Notting Hill; Hugh Grant and yoghurt flogging doxy Martine McCutcheon and every other cunt in Love Actually), Curtis turns his Parker shit ink pen to the wacky world of pirate radio, where men are rapey two-dimensional pricks and women, instead of being the more rounded one-dimensional characters of his previous films, are reduced to the role of duplicitous cock mad vaginas on legs.

It’s difficult to know where to start hating The Boat That Rocked. You can choose to hate it as a whole, or you can pick out individual elements and hate those – the comedy attempted rape scene, for example, or the misogynist camaraderie of the Radio Rock DJs; the name Radio Rock; the fact that one of the characters is named Twatt (the extra ’t’ is what makes it hilarious); Kenneth Branagh’s sensitive portrayal of a man who shouts “Arse!” a lot; the cutaways to listeners of the radio station dancing by camper vans, or dancing in parks, or crowded around radios or, in one eye-widening scene, sitting on the toilet; the recreation of the Electric Ladyland album cover because it’s got tits in it. There’s more – so much more – to hate, but to continue would turn this paragraph into the longest paragraph in the history of paragraphs.

The story appears to be this: some annoying gobshites we’re supposed to like or care about or at least not wish death upon at the earliest opportunity run a radio station from a boat; Kenneth Branagh’s character – let’s call him Arse – and his assistant Twatt (Twatt!) are uptight suit-wearing establishment types who want to stop them because the script requires it. Along the way the annoying gobshites enjoy copious sexual exploits with nubile young women, fall out over the nubile young women because women are duplicitous or cock mad or both, and make up in manly ways that only men can, such as climbing things or punching each other in the arm. Two men on your ship experiencing a clash of egos? Why not settle it by climbing the mast and jumping into the sea? It’s perfectly fucking logical if you think about it.

Eventually Arse and Twatt (Twatt!) find a way to ban pirate radio (boo!) but the annoying gobshites keep broadcasting (hurrah!). In what I’m sure is supposed to be a rousing scene, the annoying gobshites aboard the boat stand up one by one and announce their reasons for defying Arse and Twatt. The trouble is, the script is so lazily written and the characters have been subjected to so little peril that the scene is pointless. Of course they’re going to keep broadcasting – the script demands it.

Then the ship sinks and you think the annoying gobshites might die. In the end, disappointingly, none of them do, not even the one who spent four hours submerged in freezing cold water in a leather jacket.

It’s not just the mast climbing scene that defies logic – the only way to explain the script’s baffling plot contrivances and character behaviour is if it had been written by a man who believed that, in any given situation, these characters would do the precise opposite of what real people would actually do. In the crazy world Curtis has created everybody does what they do for some reason, probably, but the script never bothers to tell us what those reasons are. They just do things. Presumably they’re all sociopaths.

Eventually, the film tricks you into thinking it’s going to end. The ship begins to sink and with a great sense of drama and urgency, the annoying gobshites sit around talking about things for four or five hours until, in the nick of time, a lot of CGI boats arrive to rescue them. Fantastically, there seems to be a boat dedicated to each DJ and, rather than swimming to the nearest boat, the DJs ignore their survival instincts and make for the boat that likes them the most. How do we know the people of each boat like a particular gobshite? By observing the carefully written placards held up by the respective crews. Under the circumstances, a normal person might think that shaving half an hour or so off the rescue time by not painting messages of devotion on large pieces of card would be prudent but, you know, fuck the RNLI and its obsession with haste.

In the midst of all these knee-slapping japes, one of the annoying gobshites is thought to have suffered a horrible death, drowning inside a sinking ship. Don’t dwell on that too much, though, because – look! – Nick Frost’s rapey character has only gone and hauled himself aboard a motorboat full of schoolgirls, in uniforms no less! Oh-oh!

Then, the film doesn’t end. The annoying gobshite who was presumed drowned appears out of the water like a bearded circus mermaid and each one of the main cast shouts “Rock and roll!”, because there’s nothing more rock and roll than making an audience cringe so hard that they snap clean in half.

And, if you need any more proof that The Boat That Rocked is a witless turd floating on a sea of misguided balls, Chris Moyles is thanked in the end credits. Rock and roll.