nothing more than a boring commercial

Rating: 4/10 (1 February 2001)

Let me start with the positive stuff about this movie: The music is (like in Forrest Gump) absolutely great and always fits to the scenes. But that's about it. The main bad thing is, that this movie had the chance of being good. But not one of the things that could have been interesting was brought up. At first we have a guy who finds himself on an island. But just after he finds out how to survive physically, we read "4 years later" as a subtitle. His whole psychological development is presented with the fact, that he talks to a volleyball named...(I won't take part in the product placement, that p... me off during the whole movie.) I mean, we got a guy with no one to talk to 4 years, with no courts or people judging his actions, that's stuff you can make a great movie out of (something which also challenges the actor instead of just having him lose 50 pounds). Ok, we will not see what he did during this 4 years, the story carries on. He now decides that 4 years are enough and that he wants to go back. And then, there's another situation that could have been interesting, but he also finds back into real life after 4 days or a similar period. I have no problem with his decision to go on with his life without his wife, but his period of inner struggle is so short in this movie, so that you can not appreciate his decission as much as it deserves. Besides all this, imagine the movie would have had all that stuff. Could you the have enjoyed it? Not me, as long as half of the time I can always read Fed-E... on the screen. This is something so sad, as Tom Hanks should have enough money, to act in movies with less product placement and a bigger stress on the story. I guess I just expected way too much of a director actor couple that once made an awesome movie named "Forrest Gump".