#Captain phillips movie#
When Phillips loses his own composure (I won’t detail how), the movie becomes something special. As a captain, he knows that when the chain of command falls apart, all is lost. It isn’t until Phillips sees that Muse is losing control over his men that Phillips ultimately breaks down. One of his powerhouse moments comes when he looks Muse in the eye and tells him: “You’re not just a fisherman.” (Earlier, Muse had claimed the overfishing of Somali waters had left him no choice but to kidnap.) Surely the geopolitics behind this incident would make for a fascinating film, but Captain Phillips is mostly concerned about the dynamic between these two men. As the power structure expands around Muse and his three fellow pirates, something like sympathy almost arises for them, despite their acts of terror.Īs Phillips, Hanks will have none of that, however. A Navy warship gets involved, with its own by-the-book commander (Yul Vazquez), who is then superseded by a team of SEALs and their leader (Max Martini). The movie becomes a riveting, interpersonal battle for command.Įventually, Captain Phillips opens up to include an array of captains, all of whom are jostling for positions of ultimate authority over the situation. Phillips, meanwhile, is at turns cooperative and passive aggressive. “Everything is going to be OK,” Muse repeatedly says in his broken English, cajoling Phillips, emboldening his men and trying to convince himself. They’re essentially playing a mind game that depends on which captain can best muster his men. Yet the way that he and Hanks warily feel each other out – as characters and, no doubt, as actors – has a crackling tension. It isn’t that Abdi is exceedingly natural you can see the effort in his performance. But the movie really takes off when Muse and Phillips finally come face to face. With his trademark jostling camera, Greengrass brings a jumpy intensity to the attack itself. Greengrass brings an urgent directorial touch, to be sure, but this is Hanks’ movie. (We later learn these are foot soldiers of a Somali warlord.) Muse hastily arranges a crew and off they go – in such desperation that one young member is even barefoot. We first see Muse in his coastal village, where armed men suddenly show up in pickups and demand that the village’s fishermen head to sea in search of vulnerable ships.
Leading the threat is the alarmingly thin yet exceedingly intimidating Muse (played by novice actor Barkhad Abdi). In fact, when the pirates make their first appearance, he happens to be running his crew through a drill for just such an occasion. Hanks plays Richard Phillips, the ship’s captain, and the opening section of the movie establishes him as a no-nonsense, fastidious boss. The picture is based on the 2009 hijacking of an American container ship by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Is it possible to take a two-time Oscar winner for granted? I did going into Captain Phillips, which intrigued me more as another docudrama from United 93 director Paul Greengrass than a vehicle for Tom Hanks.
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