“Let’s loot an American ship in international waters” Yeah, there’s a good idea. Pssst, fellas! The United States doesn’t have a real good sense of humor about this kind of stuff. Look, I can’t speak for France or New Zealand or Thailand or Suriname or Vatican City, but I know this: you attack America from abroad in any form and death is going to follow. I’m just sayin’. The only people truly able to attack this country without serious bloody retaliation work on Wall Street.
Several years ago, piracy made a comeback in the poorer regions of the globe. I wouldn’t have figured piracy to be a fad, like skateboarding or hula hoops, and yet, well, there ya go. It’s possible somebody got a bootleg DVD of the Gore Verbinski film and was inspired. There is much documentation about Somalis forcibly taking an American cargo freighter piloted by Captain Phillips. Nobody told the Somalis that Americans view such as an act of war.
It’s hard to take piracy seriously in the century. When prompted, my brain turns to Johnny Depp, Pittsburgh baseball and September 19 (talk like a pirate day). The idea of high seas hijacking belongs to a world in which man hasn’t yet harnessed electricity, doesn’t it? Paul Greengrass is, once again, intensely aware of the idea that America’s enemies need depth, especially those from a different century. We see the modest Somali village where project leader Muse (Barkhad Abdi) is sleeping late. I guess he doesn’t tee off until 11. The local warlord is left unsatisfied with the Chinese junk the Muse boys took down recently. Hey, everybody’s got a boss. While the off-screen malevolence is busy singing “What Have You Done for Me Lately?” Muse arranges the pirate fleet. It bugs me how much his call for help resembles a parking-lot-of-the-Home-Depot cheap immigrant labor casting call. “Ok, who wants to be a pirate today?” “Oh, me! Pick me! Pick me! Pick me, pleeeeeease!”
Meanwhile, the Maersk Alabama is making its periodic East African Funyuns delivery under the efficient gaze of Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks). This is not an especially endearing Hanks role; he comes off as a bit of a no-nonsense hard-ass. The Cap’n gets a briefing on possible piracy in international waters and decided to drill his men on safety procedures. At that very moment, the pirates come. Well, that’s quite a coincidence, no? No American ship had been pirated for 200 years, and yet the minute you start undergoing safety 
procedures in the event of piracy, some pirates show up … what were the odds? What follows is important because there’s a clear distinction between the folks who have guns and the folks who don’t: most of the crew don’t want to mess with pirates; that’s not what they signed up for. It’s unclear whether Captain Phillips is ignoring their concerns or simply sees no way around them. We want to see him as an heroic figure, but here he is confronted by pirates, begs them off through a combination of luck and guile, is told they will return and makes no alteration to plans. Is it stupidity? Naïveté? Ego? Hard to say.
The pirates do get aboard and then the movie spools out the better part of two full reels playing a cat-and-mouse game between Phillips and Muse. They take turns lying to one another. Both men are limited. The wraith-like Muse has a communication barrier that is indeed a barrier much of the time. I think he knows he’s been taken advantage of, but without a better command of the English language, the only way to get what he wants is to create a body count. Phillips has a gun pointed at his head most of the time; that tends to limit one’s scope of behavior. This dialogue chess game should have been the highlight of the film; it wasn’t. Instead, it dragged and a thriller became an inevitabler. I’m guessing this isn’t going to be best picture nominee hoped for. You can blame that on the communication. Perhaps this was a job for Cap’n Crunch — that man has no problems communicating.
♪Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.
We use radar and GPS
Drink up me hearties, yo ho.
Our starving nation is a mess
With our lone glass of water, yo ho♫
Rated PG-13, 134 Minutes
D: Paul Greengrass
W: Billy Ray
Genre: Pirates of the Saharabbean
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Naval enthusiasts
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: The paranoid
♪Parody inspired by “A Pirate’s Life for Me”
