Tom Hanks is one of the biggest box office stars of all time, so it is usually worth taking note of which of his movies don’t become huge smash hits. A month or so back I reviewed such a movie with Larry Crowne, and here today we have another in The Terminal.
This movie has Hanks playing a man from the fictional nation of Krakozhia who becomes stuck in an airport indefinitely when his home nation falls in a military coup. With him being a citizen of nowhere, he becomes basically a prisoner in the airport, but is pretty much free to roam said airport as he pleases.
This is a cute little movie. Hanks character gets into a game of one upsmanship with the Airport’s middle management who see his being stuck there a major embarrassment to their job performance. Along the way he makes friends with the lower level staff, helping construction crews (with high quality work), janitors etc, and he even develops a budding romance with Catherine Zeta Jones.
Hanks accent in this movie is indistinctly Eastern European and I found that he did a good enough job most of the time to make me forget he was actually Tom Hanks, in contrast to John Travolta’s atrocious accent as a supposed Serbian soldier in “Killing Season”.
This is far from Hank’s best work, but it is definitely a better movie than it gets credit for, and one well worth watching on a rainy day, or stuck on a long flight.
The Terminal gets a three out of five: GOOD.
Vortainment 