Captain Phillips
Director: Paul Greengrass
Writer: Billy Ray
Based on: Richard Phillips and Stephan Talty’s book
Cast: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed, Mahat M. Ali, Michael Chernus, Catherine Keener, Max Martini

Plot:
Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) has been a container ship captain for a while. But during his recent trip, things start to go wrong when their ship is being followed by a group of Somali pirates, led by Muse (Barkhad Abdi). Phillips can thwart their first attack, but then he finds his ship taken over. And that’s just the beginning.

Captain Phillips starts off very well but then it all got a bit much for me. But Greengrass never lets it get boring and Tom Hanks hasn’t impressed me as much since about forever.

Tom Hanks really was amazing in this film. It’s a role written to show off a great bandwidth of emotion and Tom Hanks carries it in every single second. Especially during the ending that was rather unusual in that [SPOILERS] Greengrass and Ray let it go on longer than these films usually do and showed Phillips unraveling after being saved. As he slowly goes into shock, [/SPOILERS] Hanks acted his heart out and I had goosebumps all over.

Though Hanks certainly wasn’t the only one who did. I was also really impressed by all of the pirates, especially Barkahd Abdi as Muse. But they didn’t really use Catherine Keener enough.

Greengrass knows how to rack up the tension, but what I was missing in the film was a little bit of relief. Towards the end when things were still dragging on and people were screaming at each other still, I just had more than enough and I just really, really wanted it to be quite, even if just for a minute.

Unfortunately that didn’t happen and that made the film a little hard to handle for me. And I certainly wouldn’t want to watch it again, despite its good qualities.

Summarizing: Seeing it once is good, rewatchability is low though.