Captain Richard Phillips says farewell to his wife in Massachusetts and takes a plane to a port in Oman, from where he will navigate Maersk Alabama container ship to Mombasa. During the journey, a boat with four armed Somali pirates led by Abduwali Muse boards the ship. Phillips orders all the crew to hide in the engine room, while he and his associates are taken hostages. The crew takes Muse hostage, but he and his men manage to escape and take Phillips with them on a lifeboat, trying to bring him to the Somali territory in order to demand a 10 million $ ransom. The lifeboat is surrounded by the US Navy which ostensibly takes Muse in for negotiations, yet the snipers use this opportunity to kill the other three Somali pirates and free Phillips.
A gripping and intense film depiction of the Maersk Alabama hijacking, "Captain Phillips" is another valuable contribution to the director Paul Greengrass' opus, who uses nervous, dynamic, shaky, hand-held camera to create an almost documentary outlook of these events, and in this case, it works fully. The cinematography delivers gorgeous images of the ocean and the container ship, as well as the port which gives the viewers the idea of a scale of the international transportation business in modern economy, under pressure by their bosses to deliver luxurious shipments in time, contrasting it with ugly, "dirty" images of the Somali village where the poor rural inhabitants, including Abduwali Muse, are pressured by their boss to engage in piracy and hijacking in order to pay him his warlord tax. Some of the details are sharp (the container ship uses two dozen hoses to spray water all around itself and try to chase the pirate boat away; Phillips talks to Muse while holding the pressed button of the walkie-talkie so that his ship crew, which is hiding, can hear where the pirates intend to search for them; one of the pirates is barefoot, so the crew puts broken glass on the floor in the dark, to incapacitate him) and all contribute to the three-dimensional reconstruction of the event. The second half, where Phillips is held hostage with the four pirates on a lifeboat in the ocean, is weaker, though, since the movie ends up feeling too 'raw': everything is done right, yet it is all too simplistic and schematic, as if the movie stops just at being sufficiently entertaining, without trying to pursue some deeper layers. At best, we only find out something more about the characters when Phillips and Muse have this philosophical exchange: "There's gotta be something other than being a fisherman and kidnapping people." - "Maybe in America, Irish." Despite routine, banal dialogue, "Captain Phillips" still exceeds in its visual feel and gripping events.
Grade:+++
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