This review is part of IGN's 2013 New York Film Festival coverage
Tom Hanks spends most of Captain Phillips with a gun in his face. In a recreation of the 2009 Somali pirate siege of Captain Richard Phillips' ship, the MV Maersk Alabama, Bourne Ultimatum and United 93 director Paul Greengrass keeps one pointed at our foreheads too. At least it feels like it, with Greengrass adapting action filmmaking tactics to drops us in the middle of this high-tension situation. Stay all the way through Captain Phillips' credits; your heart will need the cool down period.
The danger is real in Captain Phillips — and not simply because what we see really happened. Run-of-the-mill action movies have killers descending on unknowing prey, slow burn searches through dimly-lit corridors, and standoffs set to the booming beats of a ticking clock. The difference is Captain Phillips immerses every character, "good" and "bad," into a pressure cooker and hands them AK47s. Greengrass and screenwriter Billy Ray clash the American crewmen and the impoverished Somalis without ever reducing them to stereotypes. The movie is a deconstructed thriller that allows people to act like people, with Hanks and newcomer Barkhad Abdi, as the Somali captain, delivering two riveting performances.
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