Avis des critiques

...There are subtler aspects in Captain Phillips, which this embarrassingly tone-deaf drama misunderstands or ignores. In a world where almost everything is deemed ‘offensive' by some group or other, the near-unanimous acclaim for this very dodgy movie is bewildering.

This is a film that boasts an unforgettable central turn from Tom Hanks, his finest since early Noughties double-header Road to Perdition and Catch Me If You Can. It's a role that feels tailor-made for an actor whose talent has always shined brightest in those moments of contemplative solitude so rarely afforded in mainstream cinema.

It's the rare movie about Western guilt that doesn't wallow or pity. What some moviegoers will experience in that lifeboat is not Stockholm syndrome. It's a hard, searing empathy. In every Greengrass movie, what's at stake is both personal and political. But Captain Phillips represents a subtle new risk for his globalist existentialism.

With Navy SEALs who jump out of airplanes and time their landings with uncanny accuracy, facial recognition software that can identify the pirates swiftly and correctly, snipers and commanders who act with automaton-like precision, the film presents a world that functions not unlike a machine: A capitalist machine, protected and enforced by a military machine, both removing the human element from the process as much as possible.

A master of smash-mash montage and choreographed chaos, Greengrass is adroit at producing the sense of everyone converging and everything happening simultaneously. The movie's two, almost viral, pirate attacks are tumultuous set pieces with an abundance of subtitled Somali adding to confusion.

Once the piracy proceeds, a pronounced distance sets in between the viewer and the action, as if it's being watched (a la Phillips himself) through long focal -length binoculars. Only in a brief finale, with the camera intimately trained on a profoundly vulnerable Hanks recovering from his trauma, does the emotional distance dissolve.

Purporting to make realistic and austere films, Greengrass wanders into a gray zone where questions about the morality of representation and the responsibility of the artist are not acknowledged. For a filmmaker dabbling in recent history, it's a serious problem... That inability to widen the lens, to move beyond the merely immediate experience, is how a filmmaker like Greengrass can make movies that are both expertly assembled and yet clueless about what they're saying at the same time.

More often that not, Captain Phillips is riveting. Though he remains unfortunately convinced that violently shaking his camera is the best way to achieve visual urgency, Greengrass nevertheless excels at pressure-cooker scenarios. There's a level of procedural detail here, and an interest in specific maritime protocol, that lends the film's hijacking sequence—in which Hanks delays the attack using breakneck steering and a clever bluff—a jolt of believability.

The existential realities that inform contemporary Somali piracy turn out to be one of the unexpected themes of "Captain Phillips," which begins as something of a procedural about men at work and morphs into a jittery thriller even as it also deepens, brilliantly, unexpectedly, into an unsettling look at global capitalism and American privilege and power.

Greengrass is scrupulous about making us confident that we're watching a reconstruction of known events in a known order. His actualism is nothing if not immersive—Christopher Rouse's whiplash editing, Barry Ackroyd's camera pelting down corridors and ladders or rocking with the sea, the dramatic enclosure that kicks in when Phillips is taken captive and the action cuts to the claustrophobically enclosed capsule of a lifeboat.

Captain Phillips is another sterling example of Greengrass' ability to capture the immediacy of high pressure situations... [The film] is not only concerned with the visceral depiction of recent history; it's also a critique of ideological systems (governmental, economic) that manipulate men like Phillips and Muse to sustain suffocating cycles of commerce.

...A proceduralist like Greengrass is fascinated by The Professionals, lending these granite-faced (and poker-faced) elite forces an inevitable heroism. But after the long day of the hijacking comes a longer night, with an even more cramped setting, and, in what perhaps clinches the movie, Hanks exposed as a vulnerable body like any other.