Average for a Tom Hanks outing

Rating: 7/10 (22 June 2001)

Cast Away was only an average Tom Hanks movie, which does means it was better than a lot of the major studio stuff out there, but it was nowhere up to the level of Philadelphia or Forest Gump.
I liked the fact that the ending was the way it was...not necessarily happy, not necessarily sad, and I liked the look of the island that Hanks was marooned on. The one problem I had with the film was that there was no initial indication that a FedEx executive would've had all of the survival skills that Hanks exhibited...but I suppose that there really would've been no way to foreshadow that in the opening part of the storyline. I would have also liked the film to delve more into what Hanks was thinking while on the island...perhaps digging a bit more into his past. It seemed his life began and ended with Helen Hunt...there had to be more to what made him who he was than just her.
I viewed the DVD version of the film and found most of the second disc to be pretty lame...the survivalist featurette was interesting at times, but the Wilson featurette was lame...I know why the "character" was there and why there was a need for it, but to overly glamourize it like had been done was just dumb.