Captain Phillips Reviews
Slant Magazine
It works too hard to keep matters on an even, we're-all-more-alike-than-different keel, which is just one part of its chief problem of forcefully conveying information and intent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Top CriticIt's a Hollywood-style A Hijacking for dummies.
As cinema it plays a lot like a knockoff of "Zero Dark Thirty," without the same ambition and scale and with dramatically lower stakes.
The Playlist
The white-knuckled immediacy Greengrass delivers to every scene is transportive, dropping you like a passenger, gagged and bound, into this extremely volatile situation. The fear, panic and emotional pain every character endures is utterly tangible.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
HeyUGuys
This is a epic uber tense triumph!
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
IGN Movies
Not so much a movie you watch as a movie you survive.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8.8/10
Arguably Greengrass' best film, and almost certainly his most urgent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8.9/10
Seven Days
In another director's hands, this script might have come across as didactic. ... But Ray's words play effective counterpoint to Greengrass' visceral approach.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
The filmmakers are as interested in the human element as they are in the true events they're recounting. It's too bad that they couldn't have made their real-life bad guys as multi-dimensional as their hero.
ScreenCrush
[Hanks'] performance in the third act might be a career best.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
ComingSoon.net
Paul Greengrass has created another gripping thriller with clear intentions to create as realistic a portrayal of actual events as possible.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8/10
CinemaBlend.com
True stories this remarkable are rare, and movies about them that work this well are even rarer.
Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks team up for a pulsating account of the kidnapping of the captain of an American cargo ship by Somali pirates.
Blu-ray.com
A riveting picture, but one that seems like a safe choice for Greengrass, presented in a way that's familiar to those already intimate with his work.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
ColeSmithey.com
The grueling 2009 kidnapping ordeal suffered by U.S. cargo-ship captain Richard Phillips comes to tangible life in Paul Greengrass's nonstop nail-biter. Nerves will be rattled.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
indieWIRE
Even while proficiently made, the movie fails to go beyond the call of duty, mainly fueling the same cocktail chatter the events have already inspired.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Film-Forward.com
With its twists and turns and at 99 minutes, A Hijacking outsmarts the 132-minute long Captain Phillips.
Spirituality and Practice
A solid portrait of a middle-aged caption of a hijacked cargo ship man who possesses the right stuff for surviving a hellish four-day ordeal.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Cinema Signals
Once again, never a dull moment with Tom Hanks. And, once again, a history lesson through thrilling drama. I went home appreciating all that's been done here.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Daily Telegraph
Paul Greengrass has the rare gift of working with action-thriller material and making something cohesive, layered and complex from it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
