One Paragraph Review - Captain Phillips (2013) - AHOY! SPOILERS

Captain Phillips is the true story of a sea captain who decides to market a line of children's cereal. What...oh, sorry, that's Cap'n Crunch. Captain Phillips is about a Somali pirate attack on an American cargo ship that results in Tom Hanks sitting in a chair looking at the camera with a pained expression for long periods of time, until a SEAL team kills three of the four pirates )the other winds up in US custody). The end. The film is actually pretty good. Hanks does a nice job with the only fully developed character in the movie. And that is the main problem with the film. Since the characters are underdeveloped, the film is needlessly long. The first half details the attempted hijacking and ends with Hanks being taken prisoner by the Somalis in a life boat, flows by quickly and efficiently. The second half has long stretches of Hanks in the life boat talking with his captors. The problem; the pirates are one dimensional characters. This may be explained as being Phillips' recollection of how he interacted with his captors. However, it makes for a tedious and repetitious second half, one that lasts about an hour-and-a-fifteen but seems much longer. While it would be wrong to say the film is ever boring, it either needed to have at least 15 minutes of the second half cut or it needed to take some dramatic license and give the pirates enough depth to justify the amount of screen-time they have. There is nothing wrong with long movies, as long as the story they are telling needs that time. This film does not earn its length. Is it worth watching? Yes, it is; however, its flaws become evident as the story drags on to its inevitable conclusion.