Captain Phillips

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 2013)

Swashbuckling pirates, the kind with gold earrings, long hair and parrots, possessed of some of the greatest names in history—names like Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and Black Bart—are a staple of moviedom. Savage murderers and thieves though they were, what with cutting off people's parts and all, we love to watch them and like to think of them as living by some code of pirate honor. After all, it is the movies.
"Captain Phillips" the story of a real life hijacking by Somali pirates, this time toting AK-47's rather than sabers and without the flashy nicknames, of a cargo ship plying the waters off East Africa. Captain Richard Phillips, (Tom Hanks) is a competent and conscientious captain who knows his ship well and runs it tight. Hanks is, as always, Hanks. He's just not a transformative actor. Competent and usually engaging, not hard to watch, but never impressive—more of a star than an actor. But here Hanks should be given some leeway—his character just isn't very interesting and some of the dialogue is notably awkward. (Scriptwriting credit goes to relative newcomer Billy Ray, whose only other credit is "Hunger Games." Draw from that what you will.) One of the more blatant instances of this comes in one of the establishing scenes, in which Phillips and his wife are driving to the airport, where he will board a plane to Oman to pick up his ship. It's a transparent effort to write that particular type of random, streaming, conversation between a husband and wife—and it doesn't work. That type of casual dialogue, the most common in real life and yet the hardest to write, almost never (outside the hands of Robert Altman) works—and Billy Ray ain't no Robert Altman. However, awkward as the dialogue is, we do get some sense of Captain Phillips. He's hard working, loves his wife, is concerned about his kids finding jobs after college And once the action starts it becomes apparent that he is a resilient and resourceful man, remaining resolute in the face of a very real threat. And that's about it. We never see anything of the interior of the man. What makes him who he is. What are his weaknesses? His foibles? What is his internal conflict? It's not there.
The real star of "Captain Phillips" is the camera of director Paul Greengrass. Best known for The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, this is just the type of production that Greengrass does best. Most of the action takes place in confined spaces with lots of steel ladders, stairwells and places to fall from—things that could give you anything from a nasty bump on the head to a broken femur. He teams up again with editor Christopher Rouse and, like the Bourne movies, the action is non-stop and the pacing is spot-on. The camera is frenetic and close, the editing is fast and sharp, and the tension never wanes.
The problem is that it's not much of a story, rather; it's a sequence of events. Expertly filmed and edited events, yes, but not much more than that. It is, essentially, a good guy/bad guy movie, with Phillips squaring off against the leader of the pirate band. Like all movies of the type, the two principles butt heads and match wits, first one on top and then the other, until one of them prevails. But, although the captain and the pirate leader are the primary characters, at least some of the supporting cast needs to be developed and brought to the forefront, for at least a moment or two, in order for any movie to work. "Captain Phillips fails miserably in this department. Nary a one of the crew stands out from the rest. They all perform admirably. There are no backsliders or hysterical cowards. Nobody gets angry. There is no conflict about course of action. Nobody is even a diabetic whose insulin has been made unavailable, for crying out loud. They are absolutely interchangeable. Same goes for the Navy Seals, the other three pirates, the naval officers—not a single memorable character among them.
The standout here is Barkhad Abdi as the leader of the pirate gang, a sinister, erratic and sleep deprived Somali named Musé. He is, by far, the most interesting character in the film. Ordered to do what he does by the local warlord, Musé is not a pirate by choice. One of the best scenes in the film is a brief conversation between him and the Captain in which Musé spits out that if there were still fish in the ocean and Somalia was still what it was generations ago, he would be a fisherman in a fishing village, which his home used to be. Musé was not born a pirate.He was made into one, and he knows it and he laments it. Captain Phillips suggests at one point that Musé release him and take the thirty thousand dollars in cash that had been in the ship's safe. Musé replies that he has gone too far to turn back—an observation that could be applied to his home as well as himself. Has Somalia been broken too badly to be repaired, to ever return to what it once was? Suddenly, this chillingly dangerous man shifts from villain to victim. However, other than that subtle comment by Musé, the script sticks to the action, never waxing blatantly allegorical and, in this pivotal scene, Abdi plays Musé as a resigned and very young man faced with a life without prospect, deftly avoiding preachiness or martyrdom—a refreshing change from so much of what is out there. He is not a swashbuckling and proud pirate captain. He is a broken man with not so much as a parrot on his shoulder.