Paul Greengrass built his reputation on shaky cameras and men running out of time. In Captain Phillips, he points that machinery at the Indian Ocean and lets it idle for 134 minutes, which is both the film’s method and its occasional burden. The 2013 picture stars Tom Hanks as Captain Richard Phillips, an American merchant mariner taken hostage by Somali pirates in 2009. It premiered at the 2013 New York Film Festival and reached theaters on October 11.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
A Real Hijacking Off the Horn of Africa
The film is based on the 2009 Maersk Alabama hijacking. Phillips’s ship was a US-flagged, unarmed container vessel sailing from the Port of Salalah in Oman through the Guardafui Channel to Mombasa, Kenya. Billy Ray wrote the screenplay from Phillips’s 2010 book A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea, co-written with Stephan Talty.
Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca produced. The tagline reads: “Out here survival is everything.” That line is doing more work than most taglines, because the film’s real subject is not the rescue. It is the wait.
Two Skiffs and a Practice Drill
Greengrass does not rush the pirates into frame. Phillips takes command, and he and First Officer Shane Murphy order strict security precautions. During a practice drill, Phillips spots two skiffs following the vessel. Knowing the pirates are listening to radio traffic, he pretends to call a warship and requests immediate air support. One skiff turns back.
The other, crewed by four armed pirates under Abduwali Muse, loses engine power trying to steer through the ship’s wake. The next day Muse returns with two outboard engines. The pirates board by ladder.
“Out here survival is everything.”
That is the tagline, not dialogue, and it is worth noting how little the film needs it. The boarding sequence works because Phillips tells the crew to hide in the engine room just before the pirates storm the bridge and hold him and the others at gunpoint.
A Safe With $30,000 in It
Phillips offers Muse the $30,000 in the ship’s safe. Muse’s orders are to ransom the ship and crew for millions of dollars in insurance money from the shipping company. That gap — thirty thousand against millions — is the film’s engine.
Shane notices the youngest pirate, Bilal, has no sandals. He tells the crew to line the engine room hallway with broken glass. Chief Engineer Mike Perry kills the onboard power, dropping the lower decks into darkness. Bilal cuts his feet. Muse searches alone, the crew ambushes him at knifepoint, and they arrange to release him and the other pirates into a lifeboat.
Then Muse’s right-hand man, Nour Najee, refuses to board unless Phillips comes with them. The source’s plot summary stops at that decision, so how the film handles the stretch after it is a matter of the viewer’s own reading.
Hanks, Abdi and the Men Around Them
Hanks plays Phillips without a hero’s posture. The performance is a man doing a job badly interrupted, and the film’s best passages are procedural.
Barkhad Abdi plays Muse, and the Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor was earned. Abdi’s Muse is not a monster and not a victim. He is a young man with a business plan and a shrinking margin.
The named cast runs deep. Barkhad Abdirahman plays the barefoot Bilal. Faysal Ahmed plays Najee, the man who will not leave without Phillips. Mahat M. Ali plays Elmi, the fourth pirate. On the ship’s side, Michael Chernus is Shane Murphy, David Warshofsky is Mike Perry, Corey Johnson is Ken Quinn, and Chris Mulkey is John Cronan. Yul Vazquez appears as Captain Frank Castellano, Max Martini as the SEAL Commander, and Catherine Keener as Andrea Phillips.
That is a lot of names for a film whose back half belongs to a handful of men. The supporting crew matters early, and in my reading of the picture that early weight is the point. The hijacking narrows Phillips to one counterpart.
What Greengrass Does With 134 Minutes
The runtime is 134 minutes. Greengrass fills it with handheld close-ups and radio chatter, and the effect is closer to a procedural than a thriller. The film’s genres are listed as Action, Drama and Thriller. Only the first of those is a stretch.
Here is where the picture sits against the rest of the director’s work.
| Element | Captain Phillips |
|---|---|
| Setting | Open ocean, one container vessel and a lifeboat |
| Antagonist | Four pirates in a skiff |
| Lead | Tom Hanks as Captain Richard Phillips |
| Runtime | 134 minutes |
| Ending | Rescue, then a medical exam |
The table undersells the difference. Greengrass’s usual mode is pursuit across a city. Here the geography is water, and in my reading there is nowhere to run. That constraint is the film’s best idea.
The Numbers Behind the Reception
Captain Phillips cost $55 million and grossed $220.6 million. It took six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Abdi. It premiered at the 2013 New York Film Festival and opened theatrically on October 11, 2013. Wikipedia calls the film a critical and commercial success. The source does not state which of those six nominations turned into wins.
The commercial result is not surprising, to this paper’s eye. Hanks plus a true story plus a director with a track record is a package that tends to sell tickets. What is more interesting is that the Academy noticed the screenplay and Abdi, not the spectacle. That, in my view, is a fair reflection of where the film’s strengths actually lie.
Where the Film Gets Thin
Greengrass is a director who trusts motion. When the film reaches the lifeboat, motion stops, and the picture has to survive on performance and procedure. It mostly does. Abdi and Hanks hold the frame.
But the film’s weakest stretches are the ones that feel like a hostage negotiation manual. Phillips offers the safe money. Muse explains the ransom. The crew hides. The pirates search. These beats are necessary and they are also repetitive, and 134 minutes is long enough that repetition starts to show.
As criticism, the film also declines to explain the pirates beyond Muse’s orders. That restraint is defensible. It is also a choice that leaves the four Somalis as a unit rather than four people, and Abdi is the only one given room to be anything else.
What the Film Is Actually About
Strip away the SEALs and the lifeboat and Captain Phillips is about the distance between two men’s instructions. Phillips has orders to sail through the Guardafui Channel. Muse has orders to ransom the ship and crew for insurance money. Neither man wrote his own orders, and both are executing them under threat.
That is why the $30,000 in the safe matters. Phillips offers what he has. Muse needs what he was told to get. The scene is not a negotiation. It is two employees comparing memos.
The film’s final movement — the rescue, then Phillips in a medical exam — is where Greengrass lets the camera hold still on a face. Hanks earns it. After two hours of procedure, the film finally admits that the cost was carried by a body, not by a mission.
The Verdict on Captain Phillips
Captain Phillips is a strong film with a long middle. Greengrass’s handheld approach, which can feel like a tic elsewhere, fits a story where nobody has a clear view of anything. Hanks gives the role no vanity. Abdi gives it a counterpart worth watching.
The screenplay’s decision to stay inside Phillips’s experience is the right one, and it is also the limit. The pirates remain a threat rather than a study, and the lifeboat passages do not quite earn their runtime. The rescue lands because the procedure before it was so patient.
Against the 2013 field, this is a serious picture that behaves like a genre picture, which is a harder trick than it sounds. In this paper’s view it earned its Best Picture nomination. The source does not say whether it won, and neither will we.
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