Competently done, highly serviceable account of real life drama

Rating: 9/10 (28 November 2013)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) is the captain of the US flagged MV Maersk Alabama, a cargo ship cruising around Somalia towards the Horn of Africa. Whilst the mission is underway, Phillips receives a lengthy e- mail warning him of the dangers of Somali pirates striking in that region, which his crew all too quickly become aware of. And sure enough, from a tiny, impoverished village in Somalia come a group of desperate men, who take over the ship, plunging Phillips and his crew in to a desperate life or death battle that will test him as a leader to the very limit.
Only a few months ago, I noted how a big budget, glossy Hollywood production was in motion, on the subject of Somali pirates seizing cargo vessels around the Indian Ocean, in my review of a smaller budget, Danish production that had impressed me. There may be something of an arty film snob brewing in me that had me convinced this film wouldn't match that film's quality, and in a way, it doesn't. But that's because it's simply an impressive film in and of it's own. While it's inevitably on a much larger scale and has received much more publicity, it's in the hands of United 93 director Paul Greengrass, who manages to still keep something of a down to earth look to it by using a shaky cam. The way the drama unfolds does have a little more of a Hollywood feel to it than the Danish film, what with a big dramatic build up to the hijacking, rather than in the European film where we just see it happening without much fuss. But that doesn't make how it unfolds any less ominous, as there's an unnerving claustrophobia to the scenes where Phillips is on his own, glancing at the long e-mail or as we see the little ships on the radar and from the ship's deck, hurtling towards their target.
After all this about the similarly themed Danish film, I feel it necessary to mention at this point that this is not a remake of that film, and is an account of a completely separate real life hijacking, that being the first at sea hijacking of an American vessel in many years. Hanks is pretty much the go to guy for this kind of role, and has done his research and rehearsal as reliably as ever, getting Phillips's accent right and enveloping himself in the role and the drama it invokes. But he's playing it off against a host of young Somali talent, who may struggle to find work as high profile as this again, in key roles as the hijackers, who sadly suffer the Hollywood effects of the film by being portrayed as more hissable and ruthless than they were in the Danish film, which probably more realistically showed them as only slightly less desperate and scared than their captives, but that's not to say Barkhad Abdi and Barkhad Abdirahman don't get quiet, soulful moments to reason with Hanks and show their more human side, even if there's nothing like the borderline Stockholm Syndrome there was in the Danish film.
It would be easy for anyone who'd seen the Danish production to let out their cynical side and frown at a Hollywood stab at what it was trying to do, but the talent involved are professional enough to ensure it doesn't descend into anything overly glamorised or corn fed. ****