“The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure” Theatrical Poster
Director: Kim Jung-Hoon
Cast: Kang Ha-Neul, Han Hyo-Joo, Lee Kwang-Soo, Kwon Sang-Woo, Chae Soo-Bin, Sehun, Kim Sung-Oh, Park Ji-Hwan, Kim Ki-Doo, Maeng Sang-Yul, Kim Dae-Han, Park Hoon, Lee Jung-Hyun, Han Jae-Young
Running Time: 125 min.
By Paul Bramhall
It’s debatable if anyone was clamouring for a sequel to 2014’s slight but entertaining high seas adventure The Pirates, made in the wake of Hollywood’s successful Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which at the time had concluded its 4th outing with 2011’s On Stranger Tides. While The Pirates sometimes wore the Pirates of the Caribbean influence on its sleeve a little too obviously, in 2022 the box office appeal of pirate ships and the colourful characters that populate them dissipated a long time ago. However here we are, with The Last Royal Treasure hitting cinema screens as part of Korea’s 2022 Lunar New Year offerings.
The road to screen has been a rocky one (or perhaps I should say hasn’t been plain sailing), with the original intention for The Last Royal Treasure to be a direct sequel to the 2014 original. Things quickly began to run aground though when the original stars Son Ye-jin and Kim Nam-gil both jumped ship, leaving the project adrift. With a studio keen to plough on, script writer Cheon Seong-il (one third of the original The Pirates script writing team) rewrote the story to be one featuring a completely new set of characters, and filming finally began in the summer of 2020. That wasn’t the end of The Last Royal Treasure’s woes though, with the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in the release getting delayed from its original slot during 2021’s Chuseok Festival, before finally arriving onscreen in early 2022.
Our new leads come in the form of Han Hyo-joo (Illang: The Wolf Brigade, Golden Slumber) as the feisty pirate captain, and Kang Ha-neul (Forgotten, Midnight Runners) as a bandit leader who claims to be “Goryeo’s greatest swordsman”. While the original involved the novel premise of attempting to retrieve a royal seal swallowed by a whale, as the title indicates the sequel opts for the more traditional tale of a treasure hunt, the treasure in question involving a large haul of gold removed from the palace in the dying days of the Goryeo dynasty. Both Hyo-joo and Ha-neul are after the treasure, so with the former’s mastery of the sea and the latter’s familiarity with the land, the crew of pirates and gang of bandits form an uneasy alliance to find the treasure together.
In Kelly Warner’s review of The Pirates she stated that “Ultimately the plot is just a setup for crazy stuff to happen.” The same could very well be said for the sequel, however there’s a fine line between crazy stuff and chaotic mess, and The Last Royal Treasure frequently feels like an overstuffed hodgepodge of random ideas thrown at the screen to see what sticks. An almost inevitable side effect of its production woes, even more than in the original here every character feels like a cardboard cut-out (we even get one pirate decked out in Monkey King threads because, why not?). Both Hyo-joo’s pirate captain and Ha-neul’s bandit leader have obviously been pasted over the characters Son Ye-jin and Kim Nam-gil played in the original, resulting in a pair of leads with zero characterisation beyond the personalities they attempt to imbue them with. Back stories or character motivations (beyond getting their hands on the treasure) are non-existent.
In the directors’ chair is Kim Jeong-hoon, replacing the originals Lee Seok-hoon, with The Last Royal Treasure marking his third feature after helming 2010’s Petty Romance and 2015’s Accidental Detective. It’s perhaps telling that part of the reason why both of his previous outings seem more assured is that he also had a hand in writing them, with this being the first time to direct from someone else’s script, and one that’s been heavily re-written at that. While Jeong-hoon imbues almost every scene with a sense of energy and fun, this is offset by the way many of the scenes are stitched together. What appear to be flashback sequences turn out to be happening in the present day, and arduous journeys appear to be completed in seconds. As a series of unrelated vignettes The Last Royal Treasure may be a lot of fun, but as a cohesive piece of filmmaking it consistently baffles and rarely seems sure of itself.
While I’m all for leave your brain at the door slices of entertainment, with a ridiculously long 125-minute runtime, the headache the bombardment of gaudy shenanigans frequently threatens to induce serves as a constant reminder that you have one. Thankfully proceedings manage to stay afloat in part due to an entertaining roster of supporting characters. Park Ji-hwan (Beasts Clawing at Straws, Unstoppable) plays Hyo-joo’s loyal right-hand man with a brutish charm, while Lee Kwang-soo (Sinkhole, Tazza: One Eyed Jack) amuses as a double-crossing newcomer raised by Japanese pirates, while on the bandit side Kim Sung-oh (The Night of the Undead, Missing You) makes an always welcome appearance.
Less impressive is K-pop group EXO’s Sehun (following fellow EXO members Edison Huang’s turn in Railroad Tigers and Lay Zhang’s role in Kung Fu Yoga), here making his big screen debut. In another head scratching turn he’s initially seen as a mysteriously hooded archer who makes up part of Hyo-joo’s pirate ensemble, however as the story progresses I can only assume he wore the hood for aesthetic purposes, as there’s no mystery to his character whatsoever. He plays the role poker faced, as many K-pop stars do when they turn to acting, resulting in a bland performance which he only really gets away with due to his character being just as one dimensional as his acting. Unfortunately Kwon Sang-woo (The Divine Move 2: The Wrathful, Running Wild) is completely wasted in one of the more poorly defined villain roles of recent years, mainly due to not getting enough screen time to register as a legitimate threat.
What’s left is a heady mix of omnipresent gurning and bombastic action sequences, which includes Hyo-joo and Ha-neul being forcibly ejected from a whale’s blowhole, perhaps as a kind of gratuitous homage to the original. While it would be easy to write off the loud and boisterous tone as grating, that wouldn’t be entirely fair, as there are parts of The Last Royal Treasure that hit the intended mark. One particular sequence sees the gang using blown up pig bladders as makeshift oxygen tanks to swim underwater, however as one of them didn’t care about the order to wash them thoroughly, he subsequently spends the whole time underwater throwing up in a sequence which is genuinely funny.
Everything builds up to a frantic and incomprehensible finale encompassing multiple action sequences being staged at the same time. We get a pirate ship versus military ship face off with plenty of cannon fire, a pack of violent CGI penguins, a lightening charged sword fight (literally – it takes place on lightening island), and a massive tidal wave to top it all off. It’s an exercise in complete lack of restraint, and will either leave viewers feeling like it was a worthy pay-off for the 100 or so minutes that precede it, or will be the straw that breaks the camels back. Like a bright and noisy amusement park, the editing manically cuts to and from each of the separate sequences, often to a point where you’re left struggling to remember what was happening in the sequence that gets cut to when you last left it, and any kind of emotional investment is a laughable ask.
Despite all of this, at the end of the day The Last Royal Treasure was clearly never intended to be high art. Compared to the original both the humour levels and the action have been cranked up to 11, albeit at the cost of just about everything else – the everything else largely being that stuff which is considered important to making a good movie. By the time Hyo-joo and Ha-neul share an impassioned kiss (which in the cinematic Puritan Age we live in, where any contact related to physical attraction has all but been abolished, should at least be applauded) it feels like a worthy way to sign things off, but it’s debatable if we need a The Pirates Part III. Did I mention the violent CGI penguins?
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5.5/10
