Before seeing Paul Greengrass’ nerve-wracking, based-on-fact thriller Captain Phillips, I’d never been able to get my head around the logistics of Somali piracy. Enormous commercial freighters, captured and held for ransom by tiny bands of pirates — often teenagers — who always seem to overtake the freighters on the high seas in fishing skiffs smaller than the freighters’ lifeboats.
I mean, you wonder: How on earth could four or five teenagers capture a freighter, subduing a far larger crew and extracting millions of dollars in ransom?
Wonder no more.
Greengrass — director of two Bourne movies and the based-on-real-life Sept. 11 nightmare United 93 — bows to no one when it comes to bringing screen clarity to complex action. Give the man a Point A, a Point B, and half a dozen perfectly good reasons the two can’t be visually or logically connected, and he’ll still manage to give you the cinematic equivalent of a straight line. He has a capacity for making murky plans transparent, subterfuges clear, and in Captain Phillips he brushes in the built-in defenses of the freighter Maersk Alabama before it’s quite occurred to you to grapple with how a hijacker might get past them.
Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks sporting a distracting New England accent, but otherwise persuasive) has no sooner boarded the ship than he’s found grates unlocked between decks and ordered extra security checks. By the time the ship is rounding the Horn of Africa, a day or so out of port in April 2009, he’s presiding over a full-on security drill.