The film is called " A Hijacking" because "Boring Negotiations" doesn't sell. The production has won numerous awards as the film is a billed as a psychological drama/thriller, easy on the thriller part. You don't get to see the actual hijacking, or for that matter any real action. The film moved from one boring talking scene to the next. Once the ship was hijacked, the parent company for some reason entered into long drawn out negotiations rather than simply allow the insurance company to make the payment and get the crew home as they typically do.Søren Malling played the CEO who is torn between saving the crew and saving a dollar. This sets up as a metaphor for the worker's struggle against management. I would agree that the film was well done. Parental Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity. Urination scenes.Film uses English subtitles when English is not spoken.

If you're expecting Hollywood, forget it. There is no cavalry to the rescue. The film takes place inside the cramped quarters of a small Danish freighter and a cramped conference room of the parent shipping company in Denmark.The story opens with the CEO (Peter) of a Danish shipping company negotiating his way to successful deal with a Japanese firm which was nearly lost. After closing he lectures his sales director that the next time things turn sour to give him a heads-up long before crunch time. We are led to believe Peter is the master deal maker, which is why he is the CEO. Suddenly he finds his company's cargo ship has by pirated by Somali bandits in the Indian Ocean. Normally, one would think to call the authorities since pirating is an international crime not taken lightly. There are governments who've been forced to negotiate with terrorists for decades and have untold experience dealing with these psychopaths. For some reason Peter decides to do the negotiations himself and brings in an experienced consultant. I kept wondering, where is the Danish Navy or special forces? Dealing with criminals of the high seas is vastly different from negotiating with Japanese corporations. It is common sense. We see Peter counter with a very low- ball offer for the demanded ransom. The negotiations inch forward over nearly four months. Obviously the crew is anxious to go home. Only the cook is allowed to perform his regular duties on-board. A Somali pirate guards him and is armed with an AK-47. The pirates taunt the prisoners. They're constantly inserting a gun's barrel into the back of the head of some crew member. When the trigger is pulled the chamber is empty. Later, after having his job threatened by a tired board of directors because these negotiations have dragged on for so long, Peter ups the ante. Over the months, the Somali pirates have come down from their initial demand of $15 million to $8.5 million while Peter has come up from $250,000 to $900,000. In the interim we believe the Somalis may have murdered the cook to force Peter's hand. Later we find he is alive but not well, as are none of the crew. At the last minute, against the advice of the consultant, Peter makes a final offer of $2.8 million to the Somali negotiator (Omar). Upon the advice of his staff, Peter tells Omar he has $500,000 of personal savings and he is willing to offer that as well, making his case for a final offer of $3.3 million. The Somalis agree. The money is dropped to the pirates at sea. They are about to leave when one Somali pirate shoots the ship's captain in the head over the cook's necklace. There is no justice meted out to these bandits of the high seas. Crime pays and people make mistakes because they don't always use common sense. And sometimes that can cost someone his life.

In Akira Kurosawa's classic HIGH AND LOW, a kidnapper makes the mistake of kidnapping the wrong kid. The dilemma for the intended victim of the ransoming, Toshiro Mifune, becomes a Moral one: will he pay the ransom for his employee's son or not? The same dilemma faces the owners of the ship in A HIJACKING: will they pony up and get the ship and its crew back or will they write it all off on their taxes? The viewer is kept guessing throughout (this isn't a Hollywood-style adventure) and the slow but gradual dissolution of "the ship's cook" may well have inspired the closing scenes of another recent Somali-hijacking movie, CAPTAIN PHILIPS (which I also liked, but which clearly wasn't going to end with anything untoward happening to star Tom Hanks). I first read about modern day hijacking on the high seas a couple of decades ago when an article surfaced about KOREAN hijackers. It seemed, at the time, to be something of an anachronism, but it apparently isn't.

Kapringen ('A hijacking') is the directorial debut of Tobias Lindholm, who also wrote the script and previously wrote Jagten. It shows. The film has the same strong psychological tension without much physical action, the same combination which made Jagten such a strong film.The story is that of a Danish freighter being hijacked by Somali pirates, and the negotiations that follow.Half the film takes place on the ship, truly capturing the cramped pressure the crew is in, who do not even know if the others on the same ship are OK and are hardly able to communicate with their Somali captors. The other half takes place around the negotiation team in Denmark, where the company's CEO experiences a whole different kind of stress and pressure while handling the uncertainties that come with dealing with foreign demands over a crappy and intermittent phone line.Kapringen is not a thriller, it's a very emphatic observation. Which is so much harder to make and more impressive to watch!