Just the Ticket #80: My Fill of Captain Phillips
I don't particularly enjoy movies about the hoplessness of being endangered at sea. Films like Open Water and Dark Tide turn the treacherous majesty of the ocean into a coma-inducing exercise in boredom ad nauseum. True stories like The Perfect Storm and Titanic toy with our emotions by constantly leading us to believe that everything will turn out alright, even though history tells us otherwise, and we wind up pissed off that Leonardo Di Caprio freezes to death on a wooden plank and Kevin Costner gets drowned by a monster wave.
Although the events behind Captain Phillips were unknown to me, it is in many ways no different than the films mentioned above. It may not spend as much time covering the blue abyss as Open Water or Dark Tide, and it may not string us along for four hours like Titanic (Captain Phillips is only two hours and fourteen minutes long) or manipulate us like The Perfect Storm, but it is full of repetitive dialogue and moments of incompetent decision-making on the part of all characters involved that render the bulk of the film nearly unwatchable.
Two hours and fourteen minutes seems like a reasonable enough span to cover the true story of a cargo ship and its crew who are taken by Somali pirates. But it could have been much shorter without the crew's Home Alone meets Die Hard meets Under Siege antics, Hanks taking a bumbling cruise director approach to the role of Captain Phillips as he leads his captors through his subordinates' infuriatingly ineffective traps (some high-pressure hoses here, some broken glass there, a bit of transparently fake technical trouble everywhere else), and the pirate captain's repeated assurances that "we reach Somalia, everything gonna be OK, Irish."
But though Captain Phillips does finish its mission to fall apart in the third act (spent almost entirely on Phillips' interaction with the hijacking quartet inside an over-sized, but still cramped, lifeboat, where the majority of the pirate leader's reassurances are uttered between bouts of suspicious anger--and the unknown actor playing him got awards for this?), an impression of the dynamic between the two men does begin to form. They are captive and captor, but there is an unspoken respect that defies the tense and dangerous nature of their acquaintance. This feeling is driven violently home with the unseen execution of the pirates by Navy SEALS at film's end, when the event so jars Captain Phillips that he can barely speak.
The emotional payoff of Captain Phillips is worth the wait, but on the whole you're better off with the cinematic equivalent of hijacking a speedboat.
All Is Lost and Gravity are looking less and less watchable all the time....
C+
I don't rightly know what new movies I will review next, but stay tuned as I resurrect the Dead Parade for a look back on the Chucky franchise.
Although the events behind Captain Phillips were unknown to me, it is in many ways no different than the films mentioned above. It may not spend as much time covering the blue abyss as Open Water or Dark Tide, and it may not string us along for four hours like Titanic (Captain Phillips is only two hours and fourteen minutes long) or manipulate us like The Perfect Storm, but it is full of repetitive dialogue and moments of incompetent decision-making on the part of all characters involved that render the bulk of the film nearly unwatchable.
Two hours and fourteen minutes seems like a reasonable enough span to cover the true story of a cargo ship and its crew who are taken by Somali pirates. But it could have been much shorter without the crew's Home Alone meets Die Hard meets Under Siege antics, Hanks taking a bumbling cruise director approach to the role of Captain Phillips as he leads his captors through his subordinates' infuriatingly ineffective traps (some high-pressure hoses here, some broken glass there, a bit of transparently fake technical trouble everywhere else), and the pirate captain's repeated assurances that "we reach Somalia, everything gonna be OK, Irish."
But though Captain Phillips does finish its mission to fall apart in the third act (spent almost entirely on Phillips' interaction with the hijacking quartet inside an over-sized, but still cramped, lifeboat, where the majority of the pirate leader's reassurances are uttered between bouts of suspicious anger--and the unknown actor playing him got awards for this?), an impression of the dynamic between the two men does begin to form. They are captive and captor, but there is an unspoken respect that defies the tense and dangerous nature of their acquaintance. This feeling is driven violently home with the unseen execution of the pirates by Navy SEALS at film's end, when the event so jars Captain Phillips that he can barely speak.
The emotional payoff of Captain Phillips is worth the wait, but on the whole you're better off with the cinematic equivalent of hijacking a speedboat.
All Is Lost and Gravity are looking less and less watchable all the time....
C+
I don't rightly know what new movies I will review next, but stay tuned as I resurrect the Dead Parade for a look back on the Chucky franchise.
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