While the depredations of Somali pirates plying the waters just off the coast of the African continent have, in the last few years, grabbed headlines every now and then for raiding ships hauling valuable cargo to and from the area, they rarely seemed as urgent as car-bombs in urban centers or disenfranchised Arabs trying to tear down their governments, with massive carnage ensuring. Personally, as someone living in a country living with massive poverty, violence in the countrysides, and a whole host of problems, I confess I did not find these incidents particularly relevant to my daily life. Basically, and to be more crass about it, poor people with high-powered firearms hijacking cargo ships thousands of miles away felt more like a rich man's problem than anything else.
Director Paul Greengrass, whose gripping Bourne films basically sent a new standard in action-thriller filmmaking, gave viewers a much more personal perspective of a Somali pirate attack with his new film Captain Phillips, in which Tom Hanks stars as the title character, an actual mariner whose cargo ship was attacked by four Somali pirates in 2009.
There's not much more to tell by way of the plot than to say that Hanks' character, Richard Phillips, is the Captain of a cargo vessel MV Maersk Alabama, that gets hijacked in the high seas, just off the Somalian coast, by a quartet of armed Somali pirates headed by a hardened pirate named Muse (newcomer Barkhad Abdi), but as with many truly compelling films, it is all in the telling, as with the Bourne movies, Greengrass does a terrific job of building up tension, even though the ultimate outcome of the story is but a Google search away.
Hanks, acclaimed and award-winning actor that he is, excels, as expected, in the role of Phillips; he is key to drawing us into this world. More than the editing and the music and the gunfire, it is Hanks' performance that is instrumental to drawing the audience into Phillips' world, to convincing us just how terrifying his experience actually was. Sure, they could have stuck a competent actor in the role and the audience could still have recognized the peril the character was in, but Hanks really puts us in the moment, and even though he's still one of the most recognizable actors in the English speaking world, he difficult Richard Phillips' experience must have been.
Abdi, however, and his Somalian costars, are the revelation here. I suppose it was better to cast actual Somalians than to get African-American actors to go all "method" and lose what would probably have been the equivalent weight of two or three adults to play these characters; none of the pirates in the movie looks like he eats more than once every other day. A detail like this, and the opening scene in which the goons of a Somalian warlord storm into the village where Muse and his cohorts live and remind them rather forcefully that they need to make money, make it hard to hate the pirates the way one would hate a traditional Hollywood villain, which these guys are anything but. If anything, the fact that these men are basically destitute and desperate makes them even more dangerous, which is why staying away from that Google search is a particularly good idea.
This film is not exactly a thrill-ride in the vein of Gravity, but it's a highly engaging peek into recent historical events that is definitely worth a look.
5/5
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