Captain Phillips Reviews
Top CriticGreengrass and screenwriter Billy Ray put us on the side of Phillips, his crew, the American negotiators, the Navy, and the SEALS. But we understand the greater tragedy of Muse and the Somalis' lives.
As cinema it plays a lot like a knockoff of "Zero Dark Thirty," without the same ambition and scale and with dramatically lower stakes.
It's a Hollywood-style A Hijacking for dummies.
Arguably Greengrass' best film, and almost certainly his most urgent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8.9/10
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.
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.
At every step, Hanks excels at showing what's really going on in the character's mind while maintaining his facade of almost folksy calm. It isn't one of the actor's rangiest roles, but it culminates in an eruption of emotional fireworks ...
