a&e | FILM REVIEWS
Sea Psyche Captain Phillips. Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi star in a film written by Billy Ray, based on the book A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea by Richard Phillips, and directed by Paul Greengrass. Reviewed by D.J. Palladino
T
o make an embarrassing confession, hearing about a new movie starring Tom Hanks generally gives me pause verging on expectation of pleasant mediocrity, given his filmographic tendency to play up his persona as one of Hollywood’s Mr. Nice Guys. Captain Phillips is one of the exceptions in Hanks’s work, pointing up the danger of stereotyping and conclusion-leaping. Based on a true story, Captain Phillips deals with a 2009 hijacking episode with Somali pirates attacking a leviathan container ship, the Maersk Alabama, and Hanks summons up a kind of modest mastery here, armed with believability and vulnerability in the lead role of the captain in crisis. Hanks props aside, though, Captain Phillips is a special occasion on more purely and broadly filmic terms. Director Paul Greengrass has conjured up another powerful saga about a real-world tragedy, somewhat in the docudramatic vein of his stunning / film United , in which his rules of cinematic engagement blend suspense tactics and the grit of the actual crime story. For anyone who was pulled into the tense standoff drama of the Danish film A Hijacking — one of the few strong indie films to make its way into local theaters this past summer — the comparison game is unavoidable. Both films address the problem of Somali piracy, on different scales of time and intimacy of the built-in angst. Whereas A Hijacking builds its narrative case over a long slow-brew period of stasis and deals with the paradox
YOU’VE GOT PIRATES: Tom Hanks (center) stars in Captain Phillips, the real-life story of a Somali-pirate hijacking. of the hijacked ship’s reality versus the office bargaining games back home in Copenhagen, Captain Phillips is much more compressed and intensified by its nearly blowby-blow account of the story, drawn from Phillips’s own book about the incident. In the midst of the nail-biting tension, we are also subtly drawn into the lives, personalities, and motivations of the hijackers, driven to criminal extremes by desperate poverty and a culture of transgression as pirates. They start on the large ship and end up in the claustrophobic quarters of the Alabama lifeboat. By way of an introduction, the “captain” of the hijackers (the excellent Barkhad Abdi) announces his presence as “Not Al-Qaeda. Just business.” Business quickly grows evermore trigger-fingery nervewracking, and by the time of the memorable scene where Hanks is delivered from evil, in a state of shock and a bundle of conflicting emotions, we get a sense of the psychic toll. Suffice it to say, this is not just another pulpy ■ true-crime story.
The Unkindest Cutlery Machete Kills. Danny Trejo, Mel Gibson, and Demian Bichir star in a film written by Kyle Ward and Robert Rodriguez and directed by Rodriguez. Reviewed by D.J. Palladino
R
obert Rodriguez is well on his way to becoming the next Roger Corman, but his mondo-exploitation filmmaking — hip titillations, homemade on the cheap — has become weirdly diluted with stars of late. Admittedly, these stars are often from the fringes of respectable Hollywood and no doubt aren’t pulling down their usual giant salaries to appear in Rodriguez’s personal blend of grind house and parody, but nonetheless, their presence feels a little enervating. HACK JOB: Amber Heard plays Miss San Antonio They’re sucking the blood from all the fun-house in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills. gore and sex. Eye-popping thrift-store icons like Lady Gaga, Antonio Banderas, and Cuba Gooding Jr. appearing alongside Rodriguez’s formidable punk moves are again casting shocks, like Mel Gibson cult-film stable of Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez, and and Charlie Sheen, credited under his real name, Carlos Amber Heard have become most of what the famed low- Estévez. The offense to the bourgeoisie is Gibson, who budget creative improviser has to offer. Sadly, these posh plays an evil CEO. Maybe we thought the real man’s cameos seem to take the place of the gross-out wonders crazy, unforgivable racism made him unfit for cinematic that made people love El Mariachi — not to mention all consumption. Not so to Rodriguez, who featured Steven those crazy Tarantino team-ups. Instead, we get celebrity Seagal and Lindsay Lohan in the first Machete film. slumming on parade. Gimmick stars aren’t enough, though. At 107 minutes, Still, you can tell the old Rodriguez is somewhere Machete Kills is 20 minutes too long, even with the clever nearby; he’s got a big thing about unspooling viscera in post-credits scratchy-stocked preview of a projected this film, which follows super-cholo spy Machete on an sequel (Machete Kills Again … In Space). Rodriguez needs adventure involving the Mexican cartel and super-villain no new muses; he just has to start thinking, again. Danny La Camaleón, whose multiple identities derive from the Trejo is always cool, but this is the bad kind of hack film■ old Scooby Doo rubber-mask school. But Rodriguez’s real making.
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