Real-life hero

Captain Phillips (12A)
Running time 134 minutes
Rating:****
Modern day pirates – the kind that operate off the Horn of Africa – do not generally come with romantic eye patches, colourful clothing, or resemble Johnny Depp.
Instead the majority are poor, desperate, sometimes half-mad, but always heavily armed and very, very dangerous.
Captain Phillips is the true story of an encounter between Somali pirates and an American container ship, the Maersk Alabama, sailing between Saudi Arabia and Kenya in 2009. At that time, there were dozens of attempted – and some successful – seizing of foreign ships, which were then held to ransom, often for months at a time.
Based on the book written by the real-life Captain Richard Phillips after the encounter, the film tells how his vessel was seized and held, and how he was eventually rescued by US Special Forces after 72 hours of unremitting fear and tension.
As with most true stories, the excitement and drama of the film hardly needs accentuating from British director Paul Greengrass (Bourne Supremacy).
What is perhaps unusual is how the pirates, criminals as they were, receive a semi-sympathetic voice in the movie, demonstrating their own plight as poor foot soldiers operating under the control of ruthless warlords keen to finance their ever-vicious battles by means of Western resources and ships.
The leader of the pirate crew, Muse (Barkhad Abdi) is thoughtful, wistful, a good leader of men, and in another life would have been an impressive soldier. Instead, he was a poor fisherman with no industry in which to operate and preyed upon by warlords seeking money to pay for arms.
What happened on the ship has now been well documented. It follows Muse as he battles to get on the ship, but then his plan falls apart. He is duped by the crew, but Captain Phillips’ life is imperilled in the ensuing mayhem.
Hanks must surely have a liking for the water and being stranded on the high seas, bearing in mind the privations he underwent in Cast Away (2000) when he played a FedEx man stranded on a desert island for four years.
Hanks brings forth a memorable performance but interestingly it is the charismatic Muse that keeps your attention more, his sad eyes those of a man driven to extremes by fear and desperation.
This is a well-crafted and engaging film that focuses on one of the much less romantic aspects of today’s reality of life at sea.