Tom Hanks is the captain of our ship, of our ship, and gets himself ready to take this ship through some dangerous waters nearish Africa, or somewhere, never was good at geography. This ship is owned by Maersk who want Tom to transport and deliver some things. Tom is happy with this other than the fact there may be pirates, not the ARRRGGGHH kind but the AK-47 carrying, somalian kind. As per usual Tom is bang on the money and the pesky pirates turn up to capture the ship and toddle off with all the booty. Then starts a game of survival between Tom and the pirates, who will win and come out on top?.........hang on.......is that?........yeh that looks like the entire american Navy, plus their seals.........guess that answers that then.
On paper this film is a cocktail of complete and utter awesomeness. Firstly it is completely true, small artistic license aside, and the awful events portrayed on screen all happened. Secondly it stars Tom 'Turner and Hooch' Hanks who is one of the greatest actors of all time and churns out great performance after great performance. The third and frankly most important is the director, Paul Greengrass, who is a genius and one of the smartest people to ever sit behind the camera. He masterfully creates a film that feels brutally real and crucially on both sides of the hijacking. In a lesser directors hands we would have had a good telling of a terrifying story that focused on what the victims went through, but with Greengrass we get to see the who, what and why behind the young men forced into piracy through desperation and fear. This is fantastically portrayed by main pirate Barkhad Abdi whose desperation oozes from the screen. The skill and genius of Greengrass can be seen in the way he handled the first meeting of the pirates and Hanks crew. He did not let them meet one another beforehand and did not fully script the scene, he allowed the actors to run with it and boy did they. I absolutely loved this and was shocked and I am not afraid to admit I shed more than a tear at the end, not out of sadness but out of compassion for the poor people this happened to. Outstanding.
Verdict: 5/5
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