TV Guide Magazine

The plot is simple, allowing Polanski great freedom to play with his characters and to give his audience rousing fight scenes. Although the film is a bit slow and talky in spots, it fills the long-ignored gap in Hollywood-style swashbuckling pictures.

Time Out

It's fun intermittently, but a bit of a stretch at two hours, and Matthau's Cockney accent is about as convincing as the rubber sharks. Perhaps the key to understanding what it's about lies in considering Polanski's displacement: of Polish extraction, exiled in Paris, faced with arrest should he return to the US. The only flag he could comfortably wrap himself in was the Jolly Roger.

Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas

Pirates has its sly, funny moments, but ironically ends up a work by a sophisticated film maker that may be best left to the least demanding audiences.

Variety

Roman Polanski's Pirates is a decidedly underwhelming comedy adventure adding up to a major disappointment.

Miami Herald by Bill Cosford

These are things to keep in mind while the movie lumbers along from retread situation to punchleszs comic setup. Pirates looks cheap and runs long; it moves fast only when it is scrabbling for a shred of charm. [18 July 1986, p.D3]

Washington Post by Paul Attanasio

Pirates hasn't got an ounce of excitement -- or at least it hasn't excited composer Philippe Sarde, whose score is the symphonic equivalent of Muzak and is rarely wedded to what we see on the screen. So what's left is a pricey playpen for Polanski's sense of perversity. [19 July 1986, p.G1]

The New York Times by Walter Goodman

Pirates is a Roman Polanski grossout. There's a rat in the soup and urine in the bath water and corpses all over the place. There's slipping and sliding and colliding, stabbings, bludgeonings and tumbles from the mast. Nothing is left underdone except the hilarity, the one good excuse for such low-jinks on the high seas.

Chicago Tribune by Johanna Steinmetz

Pirates is tedious round after tedious round of mutiny and rescue. Screen people are hanged and stabbed and garroted with great care, but there's nothing to put the audience out of its misery. [22 July 1986, p.5C]

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

There hasn't been a pirate movie in a long time, and after Roman Polanski's "Pirates," there may not be another one for a very long time. This movie represents some kind of low point for the genre that gave us Captain Blood. It also gives us a new pirate image to ponder.

IndieWire

Wiped from the eyes like so much sea-wash, his 1986 disaster Pirates is considered a rude, humiliating smear on an otherwise thematically sophisticated, if uneven body of work that, yes, occasionally courts the vulgar.