10 Movies That Should Have Started 5 Minutes Later

Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips is an exquisitely crafted survival thriller, save for its completely programmatic and unnecessary opening scene, which feels like it belongs in a totally different version of this movie.

The first scene shows Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) preparing to leave his Vermont home with his wife Andrea (Catherine Keener) and having a completely unnatural, expository conversation with her on the ride to work about the future their son is growing up in.

This scene adds practically nothing to the film - nothing good, anyway - beyond hitting viewers over the head with the differing lives of Phillips and his eventual pirate hijacker Muse (Barkhad Abdi), to whom Greengrass cuts immediately after this scene.

The intro would be much sharper and to-the-point if it just opened on Muse in Somalia, but one suspects the studio wanted to have Hanks in the film's very first scene, so we ended up with this clumsy, heavy-handed nonsense.