| USA TODAY | - |
It
takes a particularly agile director to helm a movie set on the roiling
high seas, and it's additionally tricky to make a riveting thriller
about a real-life event where the outcome is known.
Tom Hanks, the ideal on-screen Everyman, intensifies the sense of authenticity in this taut, relentless and riveting story of survival against terrible odds.
But it's not surprising that Paul Greengrass, who directed such suspenseful films as The Bourne Supremacyand United 93, could enthrall audiences with Captain Phillips (***½ out of four; rated PG-13; opens Friday nationwide), his harrowing account of the 2009 hijacking of the American freighter Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates.
While told from the perspective of the ship's captain, Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks), it does not ignore the desperate situation that drove four Somali men to climb aboard the ship and demand great quantities of cash.
Hanks deftly captures Phillips' blend of bravery, heroism and abject terror in a wonderfully minimalist performance, one of his best.
Greengrass is a masterful action director, adept at keeping audiences off balance and on edge with his rapid hand-held camera moves, brisk pacing and quick edits. He also knows how to take ripped-from-the-headlines incidents and re-create them with striking verisimilitude. Audiences feel thrust into the heart of the action.
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By focusing on the edgy relationship between Phillips and Somali pirate Muse (Barkhad Abdi), Greengrass personalizes a terrifying experience. No simple bandit, Muse may be a reluctant villain at the mercy of a vicious warlord, but his despair makes him all the more ruthless. Muse and Phillips are pawns of a sort, victims of global economic forces beyond their control. The pirates see U.S. cargo ships as floating islands of prosperity. Scenes on a war-torn Somali beach showing hopeless fishermen-turned-pirates are chaotic, but illustrative.
Crew members are almost sitting ducks, hampered by being aboard an enormous, un-armed commercial vessel (firearms were forbidden on commercial cargo ships, per international maritime law). Though only four in number, the pirates have a lethal advantage: automatic weapons. The ship's crew can only feebly fend off the marauders by spraying water hoses.
Piloting a cargo ship from Oman to Kenya, Phillips is a veteran sailor and no-nonsense Vermonter, big on following established procedures. When the pirates make their way onto his ship, he is decisive and quick-thinking. A scene in which the intruders try to track down the crew (hidden per Phillips' plan) is extremely tense.
The film glosses over why ships were sent knowingly into such dangerous waters with so little protection in the first place. While the film still works without this context, it would have been better with it. (Billy Ray's script is based on a book written by Phillips and Stephan Talty.)
Somali-born Abdi's portrayal of Muse is terrific, but the film belongs to Hanks. So much hinges on his earnest Everyman performance, as his character spends several days as a hostage inside a claustrophobic lifeboat. When an American military aircraft carrier arrives, the pirates grow increasingly frantic. As they bicker among themselves they become all the more fearsome and unpredictable.
The climactic rescue by Navy SEALs is riveting. But it's Phillips' devastating after-the-fact shock that leaves the most haunting impression in this ambitious, taut and captivating thriller.
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