Tom Hanks works particularly well in this gripping story of a real life pirate! Muse (Barkhad Abdi) is leading two small skiffs on an attack on the eponymous officer's freighter as it sails off the coat of Somalia. A certain degree of bravado and legerdemain sees the bigger ship thwart their first attempt, but next day they are back again and the powerful hoses prove poor defence against machine guns. Most of the crew now take refuge in the gunnels leaving the captain to face their captors and for the next two hours these two men play an increasingly perilous cat and mouse game that sees them ultimately taking refuge in a lifeboat soon in the sights of an unforgiving US Navy. It works on quite a few levels, this film. The Somalis themselves are not religious zealots, and from what we see of their home lives are living a fairly subsistence existence where their acts on the high seas are to make money to escape poverty rather than t make political or religious points. As the drama plays out, both men begin to understand a little more about what makes each tick and drives them - and the intimate camerawork delivers well the claustrophobic nature of the denouement in a darkened and confined space with tension high, fear and panic never far away and a political agenda from the military that nobody watching is quite clear of. Hanks may take top billing, but it's the effort from Abdi and his boat crew that really steal the plaudits here as their efforts work on both dramatically and on the thought-provoking front, too. Certanly one of Paul Greengrass's better efforts making sure we use just about all of our senses to share their experience and maybe also to understand it all a bit better.
