Captain Phillips is on route...most of the time

Rating: 8/10 (27 April 2014)

There are moments in Captain Phillips that are truly suspenseful. When the Somali pirates board the ship for the first time is edge of your seat like tension. There are many moments like that that showcase Director Paul Greengrass's ability to create tension effectively. The Somali pirates are truly terrifying, even after learning that they aren't that experienced hijacking ships and kidnapping captains, in fact it makes them all the more frighting because they don't play by the book.
Tom Hanks as Captain Phillips is gripping to say the least, the fact they haven't tried to make him John McClane in Die Hard on a boat helps us to relate to him as a human being face with a life or death situation. Hanks manages to convey a sense of cunning, trying to out- smart the pirates, and fear, when he knows he's out of his depth and simply gives in for a few moments. Its this back and forth nature that makes us root for Captain Phillips when he's winning and when he's almost admitted defeat.
Its sad then, that Captain Phillips simply vars in to unnecessary boredom a couple of times throughout the film. This is caused by Greengrass simply holding on to the tension of the scene to long and giving us no relief. Understandably, this is supposed to be s non stop, intense film, but with no relief we simply start to not care, the tension simply withers away because you aren't moving the scene forward. I feel the 2 hour and 18 minute runtime could have been trimmed down to 2 hours because of the amount of times Greengrass does go past the breaking point.
Overall, Captain Phillips is a fantastic film. Greengrass does jump the shark, trying to squeeze as much tension from a scene as possible, many times throughout the film. But Tom Hanks gives such a realistic portrayal of a man faced with impossible odds and the fact that the film is tense and thrilling for the most part. Captain Phillips manages to work on so many levels.