by Brett Parker
I remember that day in 2009 when America was glued to the startling suspense in the ordeal of Captain Richard Phillips, the cargo ship captain who was being held hostage by Somali pirates on a lifeboat in the ocean. All the media outlets were hanging onto every bit of the unfolding drama until Navy SEALS intervened with awe-inspiring expertise to end the ordeal. After feeling horrifying sympathy for Phillips, beaming pride in our navy, and great sadness over the awful circumstances that cause Somali piracy, the cinephile in me couldn’t help but ponder that this would all make for an exciting movie one day.
And so it has. Director Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum) has taken his knack for wringing kinetic cinematic danger from real world events and applied it to Captain Phillip’s tale, turning it into a gripping thriller. But nothing here feels terribly boasted or “Hollywood-ized.” Greengrass appears to stick to the factual details of the horrible event, and that proves to contain all the high-wattage tension needed to give this film juice. It also provides a lead role for Tom Hanks, who hasn’t had an interesting part in ages, that lets him shine with true grit.
On April 8th, 2009, the Maersk Alabama finds itself in dangerous waters as it ships 17,000 metric tons of cargo en route to Mombassa, Kenya. Four Somali pirates, all between the ages of 17-19, board the ship with AK-47s. The pirates’ leader, Muse (Barkhad Abdi), points a gun at Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) and starts demanding money or the crew will be killed. Thanks to training on how to handle piracy situations, the crew knows enough to shut down the ship in its place and hide in the cargo room. Thanks to quick-thinking, knowledge of the ship, and the crew overpowering one of the pirates, Captain Phillips is able to convince the Somalians to leave the ship with $30,000 from the safe. But those circumstances turn out not to please the pirates, for they take Phillips with them on the ship’s lifeboat as collateral for more ransom.
Thus begins a hostage situation in which Phillips is trapped on a 28-foot lifeboat with armed gunmen who plan on taking him back to Somalia and negotiate a million-dollar ransom for his release. The U.S. Navy gets word of his capture and send in destroyer ships and Navy SEALS to try and rescue him. As the pirates try to outthink the Navy to get what they want, Phillips tries his very best to talk some sense into Muse, who holds a hardheaded refusal to give up quietly. It soon becomes clear that if the pirates don’t surrender, the Navy will have to hurt these young men, or Phillips himself will end up killed.
Like Kathryn Bigelow, Greengrass likes to take deadly situations and strip them down to as much bare-bones realism as possible. Yet instead of focusing on heavy-handed dialogue and overly-done action, he likes to stay grounded in the character’s behavior and reactions to touch on bigger ideas. Captain Phillips doesn’t betray this technique, for Greengrass keeps his shaky-cam tightly focused on the claustrophobic intensity of the situation for maximum effect. This is especially felt in the battle of wills between Phillips and Muse, for the tension works a vice-grip on you once you realize these two leaders actually have lots in common: self-reliant resourcefulness, a strict adherence to duty, a clear-eyed view of the bigger picture, etc. Since explosive violence feels like the impending result, their chess match keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time.
The real-life Captain Phillips has expressed repeatedly how he’s no Superman, but just an Average Joe who did the job required of him. Well Tom Hanks was born and bred to play resourceful everymen, and this is his first truly dynamite role in quite some time. Ron Howard once noted how Hanks is a star that audiences love to watch while he thinks, and that ideal gets the workout of its life here, for Phillips really only has the experience and intelligence in his head as a defense and it’s exciting to watch his steely calculation even as his body language suggests a man mortified to his core. The other ace performance comes from Barkhad Abdi, who makes Muse just as “professional” as Phillips while suggesting an inner-ocean of weariness the Captain can only hint at. Instead of relying on cackling evil or reckless hysteria to get his effect, Abdi wisely illuminates an acute perseverance that must be followed to combat the dire circumstances of his home country. If the dialogue doesn’t exactly fill in the harrowing circumstances that forced these Somalians into piracy, Abdi’s performance says it all.
Even though the current-events checker in us knows exactly how this true life story ended, the film’s final act still turns out to be as riveting as high-seas adventures get. The mounting tensions, the erupting violence, the suggestions of death, and the Navy’s race to find a solution all create a whirlwind of intensity that will almost leave you feeling just as spent and shaken as Phillips feels in his devastating final scene. Even though another director would’ve treated us to more poetic flourishes and philosophical muses, we realize that Greengrass’s tight and frantic busywork did all it needed to do to spell out the enormous power of the United States’ grasp and the monumental desperation that caused the Somalians to take them on with wrongheaded hostility. It’s rare to find an adventure so thrilling, so true-to-life, and so packed with ideological melancholy, which is why Captain Phillips isn’t a movie to treat lightly at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment