The Terminal (REVIEW)

UNIVERSAL REMOTE

The wife and I missed Steven Spielberg's The Terminal when it was in theaters (or rather, avoided it) so when I saw it pop up on HBO in HD I decided to give it a try. I am a huge admirer of Spielberg, especially since his creative rebirth in 1993 (Jurassic Park, Schindler's List). With the exception of Amistad and the awful dinosaur sequel, his films have been almost uniformly excellent. (I even loved the much-maligned Artificial Intelligence: AI, calling it the best movie of 2001).

That being said, The Terminal is a pretty mediocre effort. I won't go too much into the plot (eastern-European gets stuck at JFK when his passport becomes invalid due to political unrest and is forced to live in the terminal for a year or so) other than to say it is mostly just a series of episodes with Tom Hanks (doing a pretty good accent to my ears) making friends with all the scruffy/adorable/multi-racial workers in the airport, having a completely unbelievable romance with Catherine Zeta-Jones, and running into trouble with security head Stanley Tucci.

When a movie doesn't really work, I often find myself paying attention to things other than the plot. Tucci, in an almost unforgivably banal role, actually brings some life to the proceedings with his impeccable timing and hilarious slow burns. His expressions of annoyance and inconvenience are a small symphony of petty frustrations. He has a wonderful way of keeping his voice perfectly even while at the same time communicating exactly what he is thinking. Other than that, the movie is pretty much void of anything else worth writing about. For Spielberg or Hanks completists only.