Zemekis Owes me for this one.....

Rating: Null/10 (22 June 2001)

(Warning - contains spoilers, not that there is much to spoil) Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob....what happened? I truly expected better from the director that gave us the outrageous comedy of "Used Cars" and the warm-and-fuzzy whimsy (not to mention airtight continuity) of the "Back to the Future" films. I can't say much that is positive about "Cast Away", except that whoever it was that got Federal Express to go along with this could sell ice cubes to Eskimos. Tom Hanks is Chuck - an annoyingly ambitious yuppie who trots the globe for FedEx, verbally whipping third-world FedEx employees about time being money. After some scenes with his girlfriend, including a huge family holiday dinner and melodramatic marriage proposal that do nothing to develop character, he hops aboard a FedEx plane to dispense some more boot camp motivational tactics at some far-flung FedEx hub. You'll notice that I mention FedEx a lot, because FedEx shows up in the movie so much that I think the film muist have been financed by FedEx product placement fees paid by FedEx, when it absolutely positively has to be there overnight.
Anyhow, Chuck's plane encounters a storm on the way to Tahitti and plummets nose first into the ocean, an experience that he miraculously - almost unbelievably - survives. Chuck finds himself on a small, uninhabited island. For the next hour, we watch Chuck bang cocoanuts on rocks, bang rocks on cocoanuts, develop an unnatural relationship with a piece of sports equipment, and then we suffer through an interminable amount of failed exposition with Chuck trying to light a fire. When he finally gets that fire lit, the scene is not triumphant...instead, you find yourself wishing that this insufferable yuppie corporate tool would just throw himself on the burning driftwood. Then, in a most flagrant cinematic cheat, the film flashes forward four years. Zap! Just like that! Thank goodness, or we would have spent another hour watching Chuck learn to weave vines into rope. One four-years-later morning, a chunk of a construction site porta-potty washes up that, for the weakest of reasons, makes it possible for Chuck to build a raft and sail it off the island. He does, is picked up by a passing freighter (surprisingly not a FedEx ship), and is returned to civilization.
Once there, he finds his finacee married and his life literally at a crossroads. Then the movie ends. No resolution, no further character development, no sense that the character learned anything or was changed by his four years of solitude. He comes back, catches up on the missed sports scores, accepts that he's lost the love of his life, and carries on...proving again that the character is nothing more than an insufferably shallow yuppie corporate tool. I hate this man so much that I don't even want to ship things via FedEx anymore. There's not even a scene of him reuniting with his gigantic family, probably because he doesn't care about them, either. All he cares about is delivering one of the FedEx packages that washed up on the beach while he was stranded....Corporate tool! Corporate tool! I was hoping the FedEx package contained a ham radio and a flare gun. That would have been great. But no, the film ends with him standing at a crossroads, with no hint of what he might do next, or what he wants to do. Two hours of nothing ending with a big nothing.
Tom Hanks is a fine actor, but he doesn't have much to work with in "Cast Away". The film is like taking a vacation by shipping yourself FedEx - there's no time to enjoy the scenery or make friends, you just barrel through to the conclusion. Unfortunatley, when this package arrives, the box is empty. Instead, I reccomend "The Harlem Globtrotters on Giligan's Island". The characters are much more likeable, there's a better plot, and the sports equipment is put to more entertaining use.