Review: Captain Phillips

Starring: Tom Hanks & Barkhad Abdi

Director: Paul Greengrass

In a few words...: The based on a true story events of the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates in April 2009.
 
Rating: 8.5/10 

Beware: SPOILERS AHEAD

 

If there is a better director at ratcheting up the tension to almost unbearable levels than Paul Greengrass, please, someone point him out to me. In a similar vein to the depressingly brilliant United 93, Greengrass makes use of in-close camera shots and a close confines environment to give viewers an experience about as close to paranoid claustrophobia as you can get at a cinema. Captain Phillips is first-rate film-making, as we've come to expect from Greengrass - and the second-best film, behind Zero Dark Thirty, that I've seen all year.

The tale of the hijacking of the MV Maersk Alabama cargo ship in April 2009 is tense, gripping and exciting and harrowing, even though you know - well, at least, I did - how it's going to end. Tom Hanks, a brilliant actor no matter what sort of film he's in, really excels in this one, portraying the brave and resolute Rich Phillips, a Vermont resident with a thick Bostonian accent, whose world is turned upside down when his vessel is boarded, after an attempt to dissuade them with high-powered water cannons, by four Somali men, armed with AK-47 rifles, and seeking a major payday. Actually, some clever seamanship had fended off one attempt by pirates. This was their second bite at the cherry.

Once the pirates are aboard, Phillips and some of his crew are stuck on the bridge, but the majority are below decks, engaged in a cat-and-mouse fight to stay ahead of the hijackers. Bravely, they capture the leader of the Somali group, and try to force a trade for Phillps, by which the hijackers will depart in the lifeboat with $30,000 from the safe and with no further questions asked. Things do not go to plan, and Phillips ends up inside the lifeboat when it leaves the ship.

This is where the film becomes really tense. There are four gunmen and one hostage stuck in a very small space, confined with little water and not much fresh air. Worse, the US Navy is en route, and it becomes a race between warships and the small lifeboat, headed for a rendezvous on the Somali coast. As the futility of their situation sinks in, the pirates (their leader, Abduwali Muse is played brilliantly by Barkhad Abdi) become agitated, and in-fighting breaks out. Greengrass' cameras are there, close in, documenting everything. The pressure never lets up, and, even as the Navy response is shown, the fi;m keeps coming back to that small space, a melting pot of anger, confusion, threatened violence and futility.

The Maersk, being an American ship (out of Norfolk, Virginia) and Phillips, an American citizen, the White House has authorised appropriate use of force. They do not want to let Phillips get to Somalia. A hostage there, he would likely never be moved around so much he would likely found again (the same fears were held for Mike Durant, the Black Hawk pilot who was captured out of his downed chopper in Mogadishu, which was committed to film by Ridley Scott in the epic Black Hawk Down). So a Navy SEAL team flies out to take matters into their own hands, with a predictable outcome.

Where this film is particuarly triumphant is in humanising the bad guys. They're not one-dimensional stereotypes like in so many other films. Rather, they are real people with real problems. Poverty is rife in Somalia. Hijacking freighters keeps food on the table. Greengrass and his writers give them a beating heart, and you begin to feel sorry for them as you see the only way out is either a long prison sentence in America or death. It was, at times, easy to forget that they were the bad guys in all of this: an interesting angle to the story. Phillips' discourse with them is very interesting. You can see the mental strain they are under, though his pleas to give themselves up go unheeded.

The last ten minutes are particularly gripping, as a SEAL negotiator buys time for his colleagues to plan a rescue mission. Phillips complicates this by trying to escape himself. It's here where Hanks is at his finest, and Abdi shines, too. The scenes where Phillips, beleiving himself about to be executed, writes a letter home, and is at gunpoint for agonising seconds before the rescue are brilliant but agonising. It's edge-of-your-seat stuff, superbly put together by a master film-maker. At the end, you feel the same relief as Phillips, who is taken aboard a US Navy vessel to be checked out, en route to home. His exhaustion, stress, shock and relief, all mixed together, is palpable.

Intense and smart, this is a film you must see, for it is a two-hour showcase or a director and an actor working at the absolute peak of their powers. In time, it will be acknowledged as one of Hanks' best performances, no mean feat when you consider some of his past works.