Pirate Chang Pao-Chai (Ti Lung) springs a leak after an otherwise successful raid on a foreign ship. He goes ashore to get materials to patch his ship up, where he encounters corrupt Qing officials and poor, oppressed peasants. Being a good man at heart, he decides to help out and becomes an even bigger outlaw in the process.
Try and guess if you can spot what the problem with THE PIRATE is going to be from the plot synopsis above. No, Im not saying its unimaginative and formulaic (although it is). Thats right hardly any of it takes place at sea! Actually, Id say there are fewer sea scenes than in that other pirate film that never was, PROJECT A. Trouble is, though, that PROJECT A didnt suffer as a result. This does.
Things start off extremely promising. Theres a battle between the pirates and a ship full of...erm...rather Chinese-looking Englishmen. The ships are great though, and there are some big explosions going on. However, land is always in sight, which does spoil the effect somewhat. Its not piracy on the high seas so much as piracy in a bit of a bay somewhere. Never mind, I thought, maybe things will pick up later...
Its always a welcome change to see Ti Lung take the starring role for once instead of David Chiang (whos given a guest starring credit but does feature quite heavily). It seems like Ive seen a million of these Ti Lung/David Chiang films, but in truth Ive probably only seen about five-hundred-and-eighty-thousand or so. For this, Chang is Jointly Director (as it says in the credits) with Pao Hsueh-Li (who worked on many other Chang Cheh films in co-directing capacity) and jack-of-all-trades Wu Ma.
The three directors do not improve anything, and were probably only utilised to speed the process up to knock this out as quickly as possible. The story is a real letdown. Ti Lung as Chang is utterly unbelievable as a pirate when he comes ashore because hes such a compassionate character and always looking out for the peasants, which seems totally at odds with the whole point of being a pirate. Things do improve toward the end when he starts beating up the bad guys, but its too little too late and cant save the movie. When the film ends, we get a little epilogue which tells us that Chang Pao-Chai was a real person and what happened to him after the (highly fictionalised, I suspect) events depicted in the movie. Well, fancy that.
The only other notable element is Dean Shek. In one scene, he appears to be unaware hes being filmed, and if you watch him later in the film he has a brief background action scene and it is blatantly obvious he hasnt got a clue what hes been asked to do and looks incredibly uncomfortable.
There are bucketfuls of historical epics from Chang Cheh during the early to mid 70s, but Id say this is probably the worst of the lot. For completists only.
Reviewer Score: 4
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