The sorest pirate film like EVER. 

Despite having attached Walter Matthau’s superbly expressive face and Roman Polanski’s name, Pirates is the sorest pirate film, like EVER. Nothing stands, the story’s turning points are a slow drab, the disparate elements mingle with genre conventions and feel shattered on the board.

How is such a thing possible? 
This bit of wiki from imdb could bring some insight:

“Roman Polanski first wrote the screenplay for this picture in 1974, but couldn’t get financing for about a dozen years. While in development at Paramount Pictures, the original budget for the film had been $15 million. Over the 12 years it was stuck in “development hell,” the budget ballooned in excess of $30 million, which was a very large movie budget in the 1980’s. It was finally made as a French-Tunisian co-production, financed by wealthy Tunisian Tarak Ben Ammar. Beginning in 1984, the movie was filmed in Tunisia, Malta and the Seychelles (which are a set of remote islands off the coast of East Africa).”

That sort of settles it.