Captain Phillips

This is a gripping edge-of-your-seat film about the highjacking of an American freighter captained by Tom Hanks with a short, mature, grey beard and sensible glasses, looking like a mid-western academic. It follows the hijacking from the beginning of the voyage, when Captain Phillips takes command of the ship, to the final resolution when - surprise, surprise - the American government, deploying three warships, a helicopter and, of course a team of invincible SEALs (which stands for Sea, Air, Land Teams) brings the film to a predictable conclusion, doing their SEAL-like heroics, in this case involving parachutes. The arrival of SEALs is like the fat lady singing in another context - it brings the story to a well-ordered conclusion according to the audience's expectations and the conventions of the genre. Lantern jaws and short haircuts are de rigeur as serious-looking military types, always refraining from smiling, bark phrases into their walky-talkies. Don't they have any unsuitable types, with floppy hair, smiling at inappropriate moments, and not taking the proceedings as seriously as they should?

The ship is highjacked by a bunch of Somalis who seem intelligent, if a little wild-eyed and unstable on occasions, and very focused on their goal of extracting several million dollars from who-ever they can persuade to pay up (the film does not make it clear who's pockets are in the firing-line, unlike Tobias Lindholm's recent film, A Hijacking, which focused on the negotiation process). Catherine Keener has an amazingly small part for such a well-known actress, and I suspect that most of her contribution - probably as distressed wife at the end of a telephone line - ended up on the cutting room floor. Still, Hanks has his hands full, with caring wife or not (he does find time to send her an email), degenerating in the course of the film from calm control to whimpering like a child. Given that the hijackers were demanding a very large sum of money, the absence of the ship's owners in the film is striking. It is known that the sea off Somalia is a hijacking hot spot, and it amazed me that a ship that size did not carry any weapons at all, given the number of guns on the US mainland. I would have thought that at least the captain would have had control of a cupboard containing arms.

The subtext of the film, the subliminal message, like that of many other American films flaunting the US's military hardware and prowess, is that the US has spent so much on its military equipment that it will never be beaten, and that the sixteen percent of it's population, and twenty percent of its children, who live in poverty, will just have to show a little understanding. Each time I saw in the film a radar screen, or a helicopter, or a gun, I asked myself 'how many schoolbooks did that cost?'.

A good film, like the recent Argo, for those who can switch off the political part of their brain for the sake of entertainment, and yield themselves to the pleasures of a straight-down-the-middle American genre movie. The director, Paul Greengrass, from Cheam in Surrey, has obviously made the Faustian pact. He is good at this sort of thing (he made The Green Zone, United 93 and a couple of Bourne films) and I hope he has a good career.