A Hijacking

If you are a Wes Anderson fan, then you know how funny the pirate scenes were in Life Aquatic. “You will all be getting incompletes” Sadly we all can’t go raiding an island with Bill Murray to steal our loot back but thankfully none of us will ever have to deal with Jeff Goldblum and his army of gay German seamen. Well in A Hijacking, Denmark’s Tobias Lindholm gives us a very real look at what actually happens when a ship is hijacked out in the open sea.

The movie really centers around Mikkel the ship’s cook which is played by the Danish Pilou Asbaek. It starts off by letting you hear a phone conversation between him and his wife as he apparently is on his last run with the ship and cannot wait to return home to her and their young daughter. You are then taken to a business meeting back in Denmark between a Japanese group and a corporate CEO Pete Ludvigsen, where you see Pete’s shrewd negotiation skills on display. The second the meeting is over however, Peter and his protégé’ Lars get a distress call from the ship’s captain saying that they have been attacked by pirates. The entire mood on the ship has gone from light heartedness to utter terror as they are being pushed around and bullied by the Somali pirates who initially do not seem to have any particular plan or demands in place. This is until their interpreter Omar shows up.

Peter decides to hire an outside consultant to help him in the negotiations between the pirates and his company in an attempt to help get his people back alive. But in true CEO form, he goes against his consultant’s strong suggestion of them hiring an independent negotiator in favor of handling the negotiations himself. And here is where the underlying message of the movie starts to take shape. Omar initially uses Mikkel as his main communicator with the corporate office and lets him know that depending upon how they respond, this situation could be over in a week or it could take as long as a year.

Lindholm does an amazing job of showing you without being preachy or spelling it out for you, just how out of touch corporate bosses can be with the real world. Peter treats the entire situation like it’s a board room meeting and continues to negotiate the ransom price with Omar without having any clue as to what the hostages are really going through on the ship. They are stuck in hot and cramped rooms while being forced to utilize a bucket in the corner as their toilet. Lindholm also purposely slows the movie to a halt at times just to give you a sense of how this entire situation is being unnecessarily dragged out.

And psychologically you the viewer are being pulled in different directions because one moment you think the crew and their captors are bonding but in the very next scene they use that same comfort level against them to issue a very real threat to their lives. If he weren’t Danish and looked more like George Clooney, Asbaek would be a shoe in for an Oscar nomination. The transformation he undergoes from being the happy and faithful family man from the outset of the movie to basically becoming the caretaker of the crew takes it’s physical and psychological toll on him. He is almost unrecognizable as the movie progresses because he is completely broken down by the events that take place on the ship. And to his credit, Peter also starts to realize the severity of the situation as pressure mounts from within his organization, the media, and the families of the hostages. And not to mention one particularly chilling phone call between him and Omar.

Due to the story angle, the way this movie was filmed, and the strong acting in it; I give this movie a rating of FRESH. The only warning I have is, this movie acts as more of a punch to the gut and will have you leaving the theater viewing your life and your loved ones just a little bit differently.