One day, Jay has a chance encounter with legendary newspaperman Seymour Tolbin (Al Pacino), who encourages him to forget about applying to journalism school and instead “go somewhere fucking crazy.” Jay wrote a term paper on Somalia once, even got a pretty good grade on it, so why not head out there and try to make a name for himself? As the film begins, Jay is a rudderless recent college grad dreaming of a career in journalism despite never having taken a single class on the subject-though surely that poster of All the President’s Men in his bedroom has to count for something. Because these events, seemingly ripped from 19th-century headlines, so starkly dramatized the inequities of capitalist globalization, they’ve proved to be fertile source material for cinematic adaptation, inspiring Captain Phillips, A Hijacking, Fishing Without Nets, and now Bryan Buckley’s uneven biographical dramedy The Pirates of Somalia.Ī well-intentioned attempt to provide some broader socio-political context to the nail-biting suspense of the hijackings depicted in its cinematic predecessors, Buckley’s film centers on wide-eyed Canadian journalist Jay Bahadur’s (Evan Peters) quixotic journey into Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region to interview the area’s most powerful pirates.
Through the piracy industry had been gaining force for some time in the 1990s after the outbreak of Somalia’s civil war, it wasn’t until the late aughts that the world was gripped by the news of small bands of pirates off the coast of the African nation seizing container ships and holding their crews hostage for exorbitant ransoms.
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