Richard Corliss praises Paul Greengrass’s new thriller Captain Phillips, based on the 2009 hostage situation:
Richard Phillips’ calm, tough demeanor and the flinty resolve he displayed in protecting his crew make him a good fit for [Tom] Hanks, who in many films (including his own astronaut gig, Apollo 13) has played the competent, ordinary guy whom dire circumstances force into extraordinary valor. He was stranded offshore before, too, in the 2000 Cast Away. But that trauma was a stroll on the beach next to his face-off with Muse (Barkhad Abdi), the Somali pirate who commandeers the Alabama, points a gun in Phillips’ face and says, “I’m the captain now.”
The interplay between Phillips and Muse duplicates the elemental tension of any western confrontation: peaceful hero vs. armed villain. … Many of the pirates had been fishermen, and some Somalis have insisted that foreign ships poisoned the fish by dumping toxic waste in the water. Poverty and revenge may have given incentive to the young men, whom Abdi and the other excellent Somali actors portray as teens driven less by greed than desperate bravado.
In a less favorable review, Andrew O’Hehir sees a current of jingoism:
There’s a racial or cultural subtext to this film that’s right on the boundary of consciousness, and cannot entirely be ascribed to verisimilitude.
Hanks’ Phillips – the only fully realized character in the entire film – remains a calm and rational actor until he is pushed to the limit of human endurance. The Navy officers, SEAL team members and other military personnel are competent, emotionless automata, seen mostly in shadows or illuminated by their electronic gizmos. But the Somalis behave like unmedicated hyperactive children with guns – they’re wild-eyed and hot-tempered, vacillating from murderous rage to companionable good humor and back again every few seconds. “Captain Phillips” is less an adventure yarn about the daring rescue of a captured American than a celebration of a huge and expensive machine that crushes disorder.
Joshua Keating bemoans the lack of historical context:
For instance: In the film, Muse briefly mentions foreign vessels coming to take away the fish off the Somali coast. Viewers new to the subject may not know what to make of these remarks, but they refer to what many observers believe was a precipitating cause of the uptick in Somali piracy roughly 20 years ago. When the regime of longtime Somali dictator Siad Barre collapsed in 1991, the country was plunged into ongoing violence between rival armed groups and left without a central government capable of defending the country’s economic interests—including the “exclusive economic zone” off the Somali coast. Fleets from Europe and Asia quickly moved in, depleting the supply of fish.
As an African Development Bank report from 2011 put it, “Fishermen, dismayed at the inability of the central government to protect their country’s EEZ, and at the number of foreign fishing vessels illegally exploiting their traditional fisheries, took matters into their own hands. Initially arming themselves to chase off the illegal foreign fishing vessels, they quickly realized that robbing the vessels was a lucrative way to make up for lost income.
Ryan Kearney lauds the film from a purely cinematic perspective:
Captain Phillips, like all of Greengrass’s films, is an immersive experience: My eyes became one with the camera, and the soundtrack became background music. I might have had misgivings about Hanks’ accent or the stilted officialese, and I might have cringed at the lazy humanization of secondary characters. But those were fleeting moments in a barrage of shouting and sweating and crying and swearing and scowling and shooting. It is a film critic’s worst nightmare, really: a film with many flaws that doesn’t grant a moment to consider said flaws. And before this critic knew it, all of my nails were a quarter-inch shorter, the camera was rising from the sea and panning out to the horizon, strings were swelling, and this 134-minute action film was over in a flash.
The Dish 