Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on November 2013

Paul Greengrass can craft incredibly suspenseful films around true incidents for which we already know the outcome. This you-are-there dramatization of the 2009 hijacking of an American freighter upends the conventional Hollywood idea of the action hero. Tom Hanks’s Captain Phillips is an everyman whose only weapons are guile and intelligence. The film focuses on the relationship between Phillips and the Somali pirate captain (a terrific Barkhad Abdi). In the transcendent final ten minutes, Phillips, safe at last, finally allows himself to react to four days of terror. Absolutely devastating. (134 min)