TV Guide Magazine: You look like you're having the time of your life. I think a lot of people might kill for that. For him it's such a practical choice, especially when one is going for a treasure that would be the modern equivalent of $500 million. Izzard: I don't play him for comedy, yet he's funny because he's so matter-of-fact about murder. Was it tricky keeping Long John on the right side of camp? TV Guide Magazine: Despite that, your trademark sass shines through. In fact, our approach here is much less classic Treasure Island and much more GoodFellas. They were extremely well organized, like mafia gangs. Izzard: We certainly have softened and romanticized them, haven't we? It's probably the Disney effect, though I must say I went on the Pirates of the Caribbean and had a very good time! The truth is, pirates were drunken, murderous bastards who didn't give a f- about anyone but themselves and would not hesitate to rip you up. Somehow they wound up getting a good rap. TV Guide Magazine: This Treasure Island reminds us how truly frightening and bat-crap crazy pirates actually were. Izzard gave us the lowdown on his killer role. The plot: Young Jim Hawkins (Regbo), who is in possession of a map to buried treasure, takes a swashbuckling voyage to the West Indies, little knowing that the ship's cook (that would be Long John) and the seemingly benign crew are actually cutthroat buccaneers determined to get to the gold first. The four-hour epic, which also stars Elijah Wood, Donald Sutherland and newcomer Toby Regbo, has already won big ratings in England, where it ran as a miniseries. Provided that you treat it as such you will enjoy it I am sure.Shiver me timbers! The original pirate heist caper, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, gets a muscular, edge-of-your-seat reboot on Syfy with Eddie Izzard - yep, the cross-dressing Brit comic - as that notorious peg-legged plunderer Long John Silver. In all then this is a well produced and enjoyable film but it is very much an adaptation of the book rather than a faithful rendering. The pace moves along nicely and there is is some great performances from Toby Regbo as Jim, Philip Glenister as Captain Smollett and surprisingly, Elijah Wood as the maroon Benn Gunn as well as a superb cameo by Donald Sutherland and the whole thing as a great atmosphere in the way the somewhat far fetched Pirates of the Caribbean films don't. This is far from being politically correct but rather an accurate portrayal of crews, particularly buccaneer crews of the time who were made up of members of the new as well as old worlds. Another good detail is the crew of the ship being composed of several ethnic minorities. She forms a strong part of the story seeking refuge from a vengeful Billy Bones at the Hawkins inn before Jim's mother is ruthlessly evicted from the inn on account of being in arrears with the mortgage. There are some nice additions to the text as well with Silver being made more human by having a pretty young mulatto wife back in Bristol who he rescued from prostitution. Firstly the whole series is beautifully shot both for the UK scenes and the Island scenes (filmed in Puerto Rico). As someone who grew up loving these characters in the novel I found this a bit hard to stomach. Livesy is portrayed as a naive and cowardly young swot with no stomach for battle. He does this by turning Trewlawny into a trecherous, double dealing and ruthless cad who is in no way a replication of the character in the book. However Eddie Izzard's Silver (played with a mockney accent instead of a the usual west country burr that jars but not too much) lacks genuine menace and so the script writer had to look elsewhere for a villain. Both were brave and honourable men in the book with Silver being a genuinely menacing figure beneath the surface bonhomie. I too agree with the reviewer above who criticises this film for the portrayal of Dr Livesy and Squre Trelawny. Let me get the negative out of the way first. To be fair I think this is justified as cracking though the original novel is, it is known that Stevenson wrote it in a hurry and there is plenty of space for fleshing out and this is what this film does in its near three hour length. It has also inspired some pretty good stabs at literary sequels: Bjorn Larsson's Long John Silver and the recent: Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Sir Andrew Motion. Treasure Island's theme has been adapted several times for the screen ranging from the fairly true 1950s film to muppet fantasy. I suppose I could be curmudgeonly and slam this production as not being true to the book but I think that to do this would be an injustice.
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