![]() I’m aware that Billy Ray’s screenplay is based on the memoir by the real-life Richard Phillips, who joined Hanks and Greengrass onstage at Lincoln Center before the film’s world premiere. ![]() I can’t decide if there’s meant to be anything sardonic about the presentation of the asymmetrical conflict in “Captain Phillips”: Billions of dollars of cutting-edge military hardware and hundreds of corn-fed, gym-toned Americans on one side, four malnourished men with black-market Kalashnikovs on the other. His portrayal of the enormous United States military operation to free Phillips from his captors has the calm technological blankness of a Navy commercial, without the 1970s waka-waka guitar. But not far below the surface “Captain Phillips” is also an unpleasant and uncomfortable experience, a film that’s not entirely happy with itself.ĭirector Paul Greengrass, a specialist in political thrillers who made “United 93,” “Bloody Sunday” and the second and third Bourne adventures, has never before made anything this propagandistic or this characterless. Rich Phillips, a taciturn New Englander who is taken hostage by Somali pirates after a 2009 hijacking goes awry. It may well earn Tom Hanks the Oscar nomination he’s so clearly striving for, in depicting the almost Christ-like suffering of the eponymous Capt. Considered on its most obvious merits, “Captain Phillips” – which opened the New York Film Festival on Friday night - is an intense and claustrophobic maritime adventure, much of it set not on the open sea but inside a sealed lifeboat that resembles a small submarine, or a floating coffin.
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