With the wild success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise still rolling onwards to the horizon, it’s a surprise that it’s taken this long for a big-budget revisiting of the tale that invented pretty much all the buccaneering clichés centuries before Jack Sparrow was a glint in Disney’s eye.
What’s even more of a surprise is that it’s Sky who have taken the macaw by the beak and thrown a pile of cash at it, paying for big-name Hollywood stars, ancient schooners and exotic-looking locations. The biggest surprise of all, however, is that it’s actually very enjoyable.
Robert Louis Stephenson’s story – and the script of this production sticks to it like a parrot on a pirate’s shoulder – is simple. Young Jim Hawkins discovers a map that shows the location of the fabulous treasures of notorious seafaring bandit Captain Flint and sails off on the adventure of a lifetime in the company of various scurvy knaves, seadogs and more bottles of rum than you’d find in a dilettante drunk’s kitchen cupboard.
Jim, played by Tony Regbo, is a young boy in a man’s world – an enthusiastically wide-eyed, green-as-a-parrot’s-plumage land-lubber who puts the naiveté into navy as soon as the ship leaves harbour.
‘You and I are going to be thick on this voyage,’ Long John Silver (Eddie Izzard) tells him, but Jim is as thick as a whale omelette already. He fails spectacularly to notice anything that’s going on around him: diffident Doctor Livesey (Daniel Mays) is a congenital coward; snooty Squire Trelawney (Rupert Penry-Jones) plans to cut out Jim and the flapping physician from the divvy-up of the loot; and, most crucially of all, he fails to spot what is clear as the view from the Crow’s Nest from the off.
Acerbic, unconventional galley cook Silver and his pals amongst the crew are actually pirates formerly in the service of the late Captain Flint. Regbo makes a decent fist of portraying Jim Lad’s artless lack of sophistication and his later heroism, when it turns out his monopedal mentor is actually a brutal brigand. But that’s not all he is.
Izzard’s Long John Silver is more of a mixture of Machiavelli and music hall comic, playing Iago in the background and keeping onside with the brass as well as below deck whilst dispensing rudery (‘You sir, look like a man who knows his way around a horse’s arse!’) and almost unconsciously Izzardish oddities (‘I caught a fish the other day and it tasted of cigars’).
The character has always been one of amoral duality, but Eddie makes him sympathetic from the moment he’s chucked off Flint’s ship to the scene with his wife Alibe (Nina Sosanya) in which he speaks earnestly of the redemptive future that the riches they’re seeking will bring – ‘After this, we’ll be good people,’ he says in an unconscious echo of Livesey’s earlier remark: ‘We’ll be free of the lives we lead.’
If anything, he’s too compassionate, too appealing. When he has to be a bastardly buccaneer Izzard – who has played several believable baddies in the past – doesn’t have the inherent villainy in him to portray Silver’s darkness adequately. Like a one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition, he’s hampered by what he lacks, but he’s still eminently watchable throughout.
The whole thing is, really. Visually, Treasure Island is superb. From the lonely Admiral Benbow pub in the gloomiest middle-of-nowhere this side of Mordor to the bustling, bruising streets of 18th Century Bristol, the early scenes are beautifully shot and evocative of a wilder, more spirited age.
When the Hispaniola sets sail, it’s hard to tell where the real skyline begins and the CGI backdrops begin, and it’s only when the ship is a long way out to sea – where the wide shots never show more than the vessel and a few inches of water either side – that one wonders if it was filmed in the Bahamas or off the coast of Bognor Regis.
Inside the boat, the sweaty, stinking, claustrophobic atmosphere is as expertly evoked as the cannon-blasting, head-butting and mortal plummets from the top of the sails up on deck, and it’s difficult not to get caught up in the violence, treachery and eclectic mixture of accents. (Donald Sutherland as Captain Flint manages to stick Irish, American, Somerset and something like Scottish into his cameo.)
Stretching four hours over two episodes is a bit of voyage too far, length-wise, but there’s enough excitement – from Philip Glenister as Captain Smollett sword-fighting in a silk ruff to Eddie Izzard hopping manfully across a desert island – to pad out the brassiere of even the plumpest dead man’s chest.
Aired at 7pm on Sunday 1st January 2012 on Sky1.
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