Nothing Personal Just Business.

Rating: 7/10 (14 October 2013)

"Wolves are only what God made them," said Bismarck of the Polish nationalists of his day, "but we shoot them just the same." That's pretty much the message of Captain Phillips. Starting with Phillips lamenting to his wife that the world is growing far more competitive, and that it's no longer enough just to meet the requirements of the job, the movie segues immediately to a harbor in Somalia, where warlords drive pirates to sea, idle and desperate men clamor and bribe to be recruited to a pirate crew, and issues of leadership and priorities are worked out by a good stout whack over the head with a monkey wrench. Both Phillips and Muse, the pirate captain, have crewmen who complain that this stuff is tougher than they thought it was going to be. Both have parallel problems – Hanks in figuring out how to placate and mislead the pirates while not getting killed, Muse in figuring out what to do as his plans go increasingly awry. Late in the movie, when Phillips suggests that Muse take the $30 thousand in the ship's safe, let him go, and cut his losses, the pirate replies "I have bosses." So does Phillips, whose bosses sent his unarmed ship ship through pirate infested waters in the first place. Everybody's got to make a living, and ransoming first world merchant ships and their crews to the insurance company for millions is a lot more lucrative than fishing, even if not much of the money trickles down to the guys in the boats who do the dirty work. The model has worked plenty of times before; Muse tells Phillips they got a $6 million ransom last week. He thinks there's no reason why it shouldn't work again. As he tells Phillips when he boards the Maersk Alabama, "No al-Qaeda here. This is business." But the United States doesn't do business – especially not a new half-African President elected on a peace platform who thinks he has to look tough for the American public and the rest of the world.
The pirates remind me of the Penguin characters in the Madagascar movies. There are four Penguins: a captain who is forceful, always planning, and always optimistic, but nowhere near as smart or in control as he thinks; a steady, reliable guy who handles details; a hothead who wants to smash things up; and a wide-eyed rookie. So here. Muse has a steady helmsman-mechanic, a hothead increasingly eager to shoot somebody as the walls close in, and a wide-eyed rookie completely out of his depth. Like the Penguins, the pirates' dash and nerve get them into situations they can't handle, involving technology they don't understand. Muse's mantra as things spin increasingly out of control, is "everything is going to be OK." It's less to keep Phillips calm than to reassure himself.
The driving force of the plot is shameless fraudulent concern. The unarmed Phillips tries to mislead, stall and distract the pirates not only by playing dumb but by offering them food and medical care for their wounded man. Once the Navy is on the scene, the officer in charge is told to string the hostages along with food, water and promises until the SEALs can be flown in to do the necessary shooting. If he can trick them into surrender, so much the better. If not, the SEAL commanding officer is happy to pose as the insurance company representative until his men can get the pirates in their sights. His lies are plausible because he knows the pirates' names, their home port, their clan, and their clan elders, information probably obtained through the usual channels by which ransoms were negotiated with the Somalis. We've been watching Lenny Briscoe and assorted hostage negotiators lie like this to suspects for years, so we'd know exactly what's coming even if this weren't a true story. Sometimes it doesn't work out. This time it does, even it leaves Phillips shocked and blood-soaked.
Hanks does the fine job you'd expect of him, but it somehow falls short. You sympathize with the character's plight, but the man himself seems oddly unengaging. The rest of the Alabama's crew are barely sketched in, even though they played a key role in defeating the pirates' initial plan and forcing them off the ship. The Navy captain and the SEAL commander are just functions of their job. When he wants to, Greengrass can bring faces in the crowd to life with a few strokes, as he did with the passengers in United 93. I get the impression he wasn't really that interested in the American sailors. The Somalis – all played by Somali-Americans from Minneapolis – are a much more interesting lot. In particular, Barkhad Abdi, who plays Muse, comes close to stealing the picture from Hanks. He's as chewy a villain as Magua in Mann's Last of the Mohicans, as Madame Defarge, or, for that matter, as Satan in Paradise Lost. While the real Muse is doing 33 years in federal prison for piracy, it looks like Abdi might just have a future in Hollywood. Such is life.