4.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity, violence and substance abuse
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.11.13
Some stories are so astonishing,
they could only be true; you’d never believe them as plots in a novel.
 |
| Utterly helpless at the hands of four heavily armed Somali pirates, Rich PHillips (Tom Hanks, center) nonetheless weighs every option, primarily concerned about the safety of his crew, but also — at all times — seeking a psychological edge that might allow him to outwit his captors. |
The credibility-stretching 2009
saga of Captain Richard Phillips and the U.S. container ship Maersk Alabama is
just such a narrative, and it has become a taut, tension-laden drama in the capable
hands of documentarian-turned-filmmaker Paul Greengrass.
Thriller fans know Greengrass for
his superlative entries in the Jason Bourne series, most notably 2004’s The
Bourne Supremacy, by far the best of the bunch. But Greengrass also is the
writer/director who uncorked United 93 five short years after 9/11, constructing
a tense, deeply unsettling real-time depiction of what likely happened that
horrible day.
As with United 93, Greengrass’
new film is ripped from disturbing headlines, with screenwriter Billy Ray
(Shattered Glass, Breach) adapting the 2010 memoir A Captain’s Duty:Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS and Dangerous Days at Sea.
That book is written by Phillips,
with an assist from Stephan Talty ... which does, by definition, dilute some of
this film’s suspense. But that hardly matters; to a great degree, Phillips’
ordeal is well known by Americans who sat glued to their TV sets during five
days in April 2009. The key point here is that Greengrass depicts this saga
with a degree of verisimilitude, and an attention to detail, that border on
documentary realism.
Add superlative performances from
Tom Hanks and the actors playing his Somali captors, and the result is
can’t-miss cinema: You literally won’t take your eyes off the screen.
The film opens quietly, as
veteran merchant mariner Rich Phillips (Hanks) packs in anticipation of another
routine assignment; we get brief face-time with his wife, Andrea
(Catherine Keener), but then she’s never seen again.
(Which, just in passing, might be
a missed bet: Just as much drama unfolded in Vermont, as media crews
bird-dogged an agonized Andrea Phillips, while she followed these events ...
and I’d love to have seen the impressively talented Keener play that role. Then
again, Greengrass may have felt that her end of the saga would have diluted the
drama.)
