The Terminal

A cloying, annoying shaggy dog story (loosely based on an actual event) about a man who has to live in an airport because of a diplomatic crisis in his home country. Steven Spielberg directed, but for all the style that is displayed, it might as well have been me doing the job. The picture is tripe, and grows more irritating in memory. Tom Hanks delivers not a performance so much as an insulting caricature of a buffoonish Eastern European hick, whose simple, sweet nature is supposed to outshine the fact that he is a dunce. Of course, he is a wise dunce. The terrific actor Stanley Tucci is badly directed in a poorly written role, and the great looking Catherine Zeta-Jones is wasted as well, as the not-quite-love interest of our hero. To top it all off, it makes the airport (JFK in the movie, though not in the real story) seem like some sort of sparkly nirvana, full of delights and populated by friendly elves, when in fact we all know that airports are among the most toxic environments ever devised by man, and that the sole purpose of people trapped therein is to get out as soon as possible. If Spielberg thought he had found some parable about the inherent goodness of people, he made a grievous error in judgment. The fact that some hapless patsy was forced to endure life in an airport does not make it a good foundation for a dramatic tale; why Spielberg thought otherwise is perplexing, to say the least.