Movie Review – A Hijacking (2012)

A Hijacking (Danish: Kapringen), 2012 

Directed by Tobias Lindholm.

Starring Pilou Asbæk, Søren Malling, Dar Salim, Roland Møller, Gary Skjoldmose Porter, Abdihakin Asgar and Amalie Ihle Alstrup.

A Danish cargo ship is taken over by Somali hijackers who hold the crew of the vessel for ransom.

A speaker phone conversation opens the film where Mikkel Hartmann (Pilou Asbæk), the cook of a Danish owned ship, is talking to his wife whom he expects to be returning to shortly after his replacement is trained.  Afterwards the cook carries on with his daily chores which results in the meeting of the other crew members.  The story shifts to Denmark where Peter C. Ludvigsen (Søren Malling), the CEO of a Copenhagen shipping company, displays his negotiating skills by assisting an employee in securing a more favourable contract with Japanese businessmen; the celebration is short lived as he learns that one of his vessels has been boarded by Somali hijackers while travelling to Mumbai.

A gruelling saga unfolds crosscutting between the Mikkel Hartmann who is forced to live in squalor, cramped living conditions and with the fear of being killed at any moment; and Peter Ludvigsen who despite the advice of an experienced Australian hijacking expert shoulders the growing emotional burden of negotiating the freedom for his employees being held captive.  Adding to tension is the decision not to subtitle the Somali dialogue which makes the viewer as disoriented and confused as the captured crew members.

There are no easy solutions and eventually calmness gives way to emotional outbursts as the crisis expands from days into months.  Both Pilou Asbæk (The Whistleblower) and Søren Malling (A Royal Affair) do a convincing job of displaying two men trying to show grace under extraordinary pressure.  It is funny to see the Somali negotiator keep on assisting that he is not one of the hijackers as there is a strange truth to the situation – the criminal who does not see himself as one.  A nice touch is when the employee who needed the assistance from the CEO to seal the deal with the Japanese contract is able to return the favour to his superior.  Also the antics surrounding a large fish getting provide a much needed element of humour to the tense circumstances.

Filmmaker Tobias Lindholm (The Hunt) adopts a documentary approach which makes one feel as if you are witnessing the events first hand.  There are no fancy camera moves and wide shots as the focus is strictly on the actors, thereby, emulating the feeling of what it would be like to have to manoeuvre through the tight confines and to desperately want to able to go outside to get some fresh air.  It will be curious to see what Hollywood will conjure up with Tom Hanks (Apollo 13) and Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy) collaborating on a project dealing with the same subject matter but in the meantime A Hijacking does a worthy job of personalizing an international pirating crisis that emerged from Somalia.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★