Captain Phillips Starring: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Adirahman, Faysal Ahmed Director: Paul Greengrass ⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆
It takes a skilled director to keep the audience on the edge of their seats during a true story where we already know the outcome. Ben Affleck managed it with last year’s Argo and Paul Greengrass – no stranger to delivering suspenseful thrillers with the Bourne sequels – succeeds with this gripping true drama that seizes your attention from the opening credits and doesn’t let go until you leave the cinema. Greengrass doesn’t do it alone – as well as a taut script, great source story and skilful editing, he has a fantastic cast to relate the hijacking of the US MV Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates. Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Adirahman and Faysal Ahmed – making their screen debuts – are superb as the fishermen driven to piracy, but there are no prizes for guessing who the star is here. Hanks, in his best performance for a decade, is heart-wrenching as the everyman captain. Not only does he deserve an Oscar, but something even better: after duff movies such as The Da Vinci Code, Larry Crowne and The Terminal, we finally get a film in which we can really, really like Tom Hanks again.
[ artslife@thenational.ae ]
