Without getting into spoiler-land, what seems to have happened in this now-famous 2009 incident was that the Somali guys had eyes bigger than their stomachs, so to speak. I can tell you that the outstanding Danish film “A Hijacking” offers a far more nuanced and textured story about the relationship among the Somali pirates, between the pirates and the hostage crew, and about how the shipping industry deals with this particular hazard. I don’t know enough about the social world of Somali piracy to judge whether these four guys were unusually ill-prepared, but it kind of seems that way. But that isn’t how it plays out on the water, despite the calming assurances of rail-skinny Muse (Barkhad Abdi), captain of this pirate band, that the whole thing is “just business” and nobody will get hurt. Ray and Greengrass include a brief scene on the beach in Somalia, to make clear that the pirates – like Rich Phillips and his crew – are essentially employees in a capitalist enterprise, doing what they’re told. Instead of a worldwide “terrorist” conspiracy that, at least notionally, advocates violent apocalypse, the boogeymen in “Captain Phillips” are a quartet of impoverished villagers who barely know each other, ordered out to sea in a wooden skiff by the local warlord in search of a quick cash-grab. But what we have here is a movie, not exactly a “true story,” and as cinema it plays a lot like a knockoff of “Zero Dark Thirty,” without the same ambition and scale and with dramatically lower stakes. I’m aware that Billy Ray’s screenplay is based on the memoir by the real-life Richard Phillips, who joined Hanks and Greengrass onstage at Lincoln Center before the film’s world premiere. I can’t decide if there’s meant to be anything sardonic about the presentation of the asymmetrical conflict in “Captain Phillips”: Billions of dollars of cutting-edge military hardware and hundreds of corn-fed, gym-toned Americans on one side, four malnourished men with black-market Kalashnikovs on the other. His portrayal of the enormous United States military operation to free Phillips from his captors has the calm technological blankness of a Navy commercial, without the 1970s waka-waka guitar. But not far below the surface “Captain Phillips” is also an unpleasant and uncomfortable experience, a film that’s not entirely happy with itself.ĭirector Paul Greengrass, a specialist in political thrillers who made “United 93,” “Bloody Sunday” and the second and third Bourne adventures, has never before made anything this propagandistic or this characterless. Rich Phillips, a taciturn New Englander who is taken hostage by Somali pirates after a 2009 hijacking goes awry. It may well earn Tom Hanks the Oscar nomination he’s so clearly striving for, in depicting the almost Christ-like suffering of the eponymous Capt. Considered on its most obvious merits, “Captain Phillips” – which opened the New York Film Festival on Friday night - is an intense and claustrophobic maritime adventure, much of it set not on the open sea but inside a sealed lifeboat that resembles a small submarine, or a floating coffin.
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