Tom Hanks is earning rave reviews and huge Oscar buzz for his portrayal of Captain Richard Phillips in the aptly-titled Captain Phillips, which had a pretty solid debut this weekend with $26 million at the box office. In Captain Phillips, Chet Haze’s dad plays the man who was famously saved by SEAL Team Six after he was abducted from the Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia in 2009. Phillips was painted by the media and now the film as a hero who sacrificed himself for the safety of his crew.
But feel-good stories are for suckers these days, and now Phillips’ old crewmates are coming forward to let all of us John and Jane Moviegoers know that this movie is nothing but a bunch of Hollywood malarkey.
“Phillips wasn’t the big leader like he is in the movie,” says one crew member, who, for legal reasons, spoke with The Post anonymously. He worked very closely with Phillips on the Maersk Alabama and was alarmed by his behavior from the beginning. Phillips, he says, had a bad reputation for at least 12 years prior, known as a sullen and self-righteous captain.
“No one wants to sail with him,” he says. (Via the NY Post)
Sure, you could say that these guys are probably just jealous that Phillips had a movie made about his massively successful memoirs, and he got Tom Hanks to portray him, even though he totally looks like a Philip Seymour Hoffman character. I mean, it’s so obvious! But if suing Maersk Line and the Waterman Steamship Corp. for $50 million is these guys being jealous, then I’d hate to see what happens when one of them gets laid.
Of course, the crew members and Phillips also recall all of the events of the pirate attack a little differently, like how there were multiple attacks that Phillips reportedly scoffed at and mismanaged to the detriment of his own crew.
“We had two pirate attacks over 18 hours,” says this crew member, not just the one shown in the film.
The crew didn’t know whom to fear more: the pirates or Phillips.
According to this crew member, during the first attack, as two pirate boats came into view, clearly chasing them, Phillips was putting the crew through a fire drill. In the film, it’s a security drill.
“We said, ‘You want us to knock it off and go to our pirate stations?’ ” the crew member recalls. “And he goes, ‘Oh, no, no, no — you’ve got to do the lifeboats drill.’ This is how screwed up he is. These are drills we need to do once a year. Two boats with pirates and he doesn’t give a s- -t. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
Clearly, the only solution here is for the crew members to make their own movie that tells their account of what happened when the Somali pirates attacked, and I’d be more than happy to write it for them. Especially the part when Kate Upton and Jennifer Lawrence wrestled each other in Jell-o. Right guys?
