Action cinema tends to elect its bogeymen based on current world events. In True Lies, America fought against Palestinian terrorists. In 2008, John Rambo brought down a brutal Burmese military regime almost singlehandedly. Most recently, The November Man and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit took on Russian oligarchs and generals. But there’s a more widespread trend in screen villainy than the rise of Putin surrogates, and it ties all the way back to the success of Captain Phillips: the Somali pirate, featured in films ranging from Fishing Without Nets to Last Hijack, and now to Simon Brand’s found-footage thriller Default.

In fairness, describing the film in those terms feels like a cheat. “Live footage” feels more apropos, since the question of how we’re seeing the events play out before us is never posed; we know exactly where the images are coming from, how they got there, and why they’re being broadcast to us now. Whether that softens the blow dealt by the technique (a term applied here very, very loosely) may depend on the viewer, but Default winds up feeling frenetic as a result of its own aesthetic. Perspective leaps from one camera set-up to the next in Brand’s hostage ordeal, never quite deciding on which to use as an anchor for the audience. In a traditionally composed production, that wouldn’t matter. In Default, it simply reminds us that we’re watching a movie.

To Brand’s credit, he’s smart enough to know how easily the illusion of his niche genre filter can be broken, and he finds more than a few ways to blunt its inherent problems. Default’s best scenes are those in which Brand holds his lens in place, notably in discussions between the gifted actors Greg Callahan and David Oyelowo, playing Frank Saltzman, an iconic news anchor far past his glory days; and Atlas, the ringleader of a group of Somali pirates, respectively. Frank and his film crew (comprised of Katherine Moennig, Stephen Lord, Jeanine Mason, and Connor Fox) are shooting a segment in the Seychelles, and when they board their plane to fly home, Atlas and his crew takes over, demanding ransom money as well as the world’s attention.

Atlas forces Frank to interview him personally, and their chats – truthfully just sparring matches between Callahan and Oyelowo – comprise some of the best moments in Default’s slight running time. Frank is overtired but dogged in his need to understand Atlas; Atlas is like a cat toying with his prey, quiet, polite, often surprisingly gentle, but no less lethal for all of his fine manners. There’s a lot we don’t know about Atlas, and the greatest pleasure the film has to offer lies in seeing his layers peel back one by one. It’s a compact character study that explore the natures of both terrorism and piracy, chewing over ideas about what sociopolitical stresses lead a man to pick up a gun and hold people at gunpoint for profit.

Like the film, the answer is messy, at least until Default wraps itself up with a self-affirming coda in which something resembling justice is done. It’s a pat way to end a narrative that’s so willing to dive into the complexities of its subject matter; maybe we can chalk that up to lack of funds or creativity, but either way, Brand feels forced into bringing his film to a rough, rushed end when he still had so much room to mine suspense out of the scenario he conducts. (Paul Greengrass would approve.) To his credit, Default maintains high tension just by having Atlas’ cohorts aim firearms at Frank’s terrified colleagues – we quickly come to fearfully anticipate the sound of a bullet report from off screen – but it’s hard not to imagine how much dropping the live footage concept would have benefitted the entire project.

Grade: C+