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Captain Phillips

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS directed by Paul Greengrass, screenplay by Billy Ray based on the book by Richard Phillips and Stephan Talty, with Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi and Barkhad Abdirahman. A Sony Pictures release. 134 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (October 11). For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NNN


There’s nothing Captain Phillips does that Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking didn’t do much more effectively. But, then, A Hijacking didn’t star Tom Hanks.

Hanks does a tremendous job as Richard Phillips, captain of the commercial vessel Maersk Alabama. In 2009, Phillips’s ship was boarded by four Somali pirates who eventually took him hostage in a lifeboat, leading Navy warships on a slow-speed chase through the Indian Ocean. Hanks spends virtually the whole movie playing a terrified man doing his best to look calm and reasonable.

The actor invests a one-dimensional character with his own humanity and geniality he gives a totally transparent performance that allows us to see when he’s blatantly lying to his captors while appearing outwardly helpful. And in the last five minutes of Captain Phillips, Hanks opens up to the camera in a way that feels almost uncomfortably intimate. He has never seemed more immediate, more nakedly human.

So there’s the takeaway from Captain Phillips: Hanks is a stunningly great actor. The rest of the film is far more problematic, with director Paul Greengrass applying the tense, jangled docudrama aesthetic of United 93 to another true-life hostage crisis.

Every character is a sketch rather than a whole person. That’s why Hanks’s own qualities are so essential to his performance. Phillips’s crew are competent roughnecks the Somali hijackers an assortment of criminal types, each allowed a single personality trait and played by actors cast for their intimidating facial features.

It works for a while. Greengrass stages two terrific sequences in the first half – one when the Alabama’s crew cleverly evades the pirates’ first approach, and a gripping extended cat-and-mouse hunt during which Phillips turns his ship into a labyrinth to keep his crew safe from the invaders.

For those scenes, the director’s handheld camera and frantic cutting feel absolutely appropriate to the action. But once it’s down to Phillips on the lifeboat, Billy Ray’s script strains to build tension by expanding its scope to include various military operators barking orders and waving weapons in order to compensate for the fact that nothing’s actually happening for long stretches of time.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision

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