Good, but Disappointing

Rating: Null/10 (4 January 2001)

What saves this film is good acting. There is no real plot, very little dialog, and the story depends entirely on our ability to believe Hanks's character.
I've heard and read a lot about the ending being disappointing, but little as to why. The reason has to do with the fact that they telegraph the ending near the beginning, when Hanks decides not to open a particular FedEx package because of the hand-drawn design on the outside. That in itself, for me, was extremely hard to swallow. A man or woman fighting for survival will use ANY means, and so many of the other packages (virtually every one of them) had something he could use.
And so, I ask myself, why are we left to wonder at the end what was in the package? Has the screenwriter no sense of irony? Are we supposed to believe that a pair of wings drawn on a package represent some sort of guardian angel metaphor? Thin. VERY thin.
It it weren't for Hanks (and yes, Hunt, whose smallish part was just as brilliant as Hanks's) bringing sheer brute-strength acting skills so this film, it would have little to recommend it.
The fact that I was disappointed by an ending they revealed so early in the film is why I couldn't give it a high rating. Filmmaking, after all, is about story telling, not just about acting. The story suffered, and so by extension, so did the movie.
In summary, I found it, overall, to be emotionally unsatisfying.
-- TRegner