Movie Review: Captain Phillips (2013)

“We all have bosses,” Captain Richard Phillips tells the Somali pirates trying to outrun the U.S. Navy to the coast of Somalia in a bright orange lifeboat. From the moment they boarded Capt. Phillips’ ship, things had gone further and further from their plan. Abduwali Muse, played with energy and verisimilitude by Barkhad Abdi, is the leader of a band of Somalis whose small-scale success in hijacking ships off the coast of their country didn’t prepare them for the difficulty of hijacking a U.S.-owned tanker ship and holding the crew for ransom. As the title character, a respectably-goateed Tom Hanks, asks Muse why he doesn’t satisfy himself with the $30,000 on board the ship and release his hostage, the Somali tells him that’s he gone too far to turn back. “I have bosses.”

But the bosses, seen briefly at the beginning of the film in a painful counterpoint to Phillips’ life in Vermont, aren’t a driving force in this film by Paul Greengrass, the director of the similarly-jittery and gripping United 93. What Greengrass explores is the mentality of these hijackers, with nothing to go back to, driven to the edge of desperation by an inability to cut their losses and move on. Like compulsive gamblers, Muse and his crew keep pressing on, unable or unwilling to scale down their ambition and seemingly locked on a collision course with the power and precision of the American military.

Greengrass doesn’t excuse their actions, but takes us along for the ride as Capt. Phillips establishes some bonds of humanity with the men who boarded his ship and are desperately trying to double down until they hit the jackpot. You may know how this ripped-from-the-headlines drama ends (and thank the power of the Navy SEALs,) but you can’t leave without thinking about the mentality of hostage takers with nothing to lose – and realizing they have less to gain. The “bosses” Muse refers to may not be warlords, but the visceral, automatic responses of someone who has lost their free will.